


Heaven, On His Shoulders

by HereComeDatBoi



Series: you're the one that's making me strong [1]
Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Adam (Voltron) Lives, Adam fuels the Atlas, Adam-Centric, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Because he deserves one, Canon-Typical Violence, Canonical Character Death, Domestic Fluff, Gen, Getting Back Together, Happy Ending, Honeymoon, IGF-Atlas - Freeform, JK i Lied, Lotor gets a redemption arc, M/M, Memories, Mild Angst, Non-Linear Narrative, POV Alternating, Questionable Alchemy, Reunions, Someone dies, Team as Family, Wedding Fluff, Weddings, a wild Luka appears, bet you can't guess whose, but then again that's canon, ft. the conspiracy squad, i know i said nobody would die but like, it's more likely than you think, jk you probably can, mature content, mostly complies with season 8, nobody dies on my watch folks, pre-kerberos adashi, s8 who? don't know her, the garrison trio being actual friends? in my fic?, we yeet canon into the Void like men
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-12-31
Updated: 2019-09-20
Packaged: 2019-10-01 00:19:15
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 25
Words: 58,077
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17233883
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/HereComeDatBoi/pseuds/HereComeDatBoi
Summary: It’s strange, being a ship.He no longer senses the passing of time, because he doesn’t see anything. Not even blackness, because his visual cortex doesn’t exactly function anymore. Nor do any of the other parts of his brain, really. He—well, he exists. Somehow.With Voltron out of reach and no time to spare, the Garrison launches the IGF-ATLAS with a living pilot at its heart.Adam doesn't mind. Much.





	1. Chapter 1

_ “What’s so special about Balmeran crystals, Sam?” _

_ “I don’t know much about them, really. The Castle of Lions drew its power from a battleship-class crystal, and from what I remember each one holds a piece of its parent’s quintessence—its life force, if you will. Not even a nuclear reactor can stand as an acceptable substitute.” _

_ “If we ever manage to get our hands on one, what then?” _

_ “We’ll be able to use it immediately. The containment chamber in the hold follows Coran’s blueprints to the letter, and it’s been properly mended after that disaster last week with the antimatter.” _

_ “Good. That’s...that’s good.” _

_ “Is there something on your mind, son? I know we haven’t heard from Katie and the others, but—” _

_ “It’s not that, sir. Not—not now, at least. You said yourself you couldn’t vouch for the communicators we built, so that’s all right. It’s just what you said, about quintessence—that it’s life force? Nuclear reactors, antimatter...they’re powerful, but they don’t have a life force, do they?” _

_ “What do you mean, Adam?” _

_ “I mean there’s a power source for the Atlas that we haven’t thought of yet.” _

_ * _ __ _ * _ __ _ * _

It’s strange, being a ship.

He no longer senses the passing of time, because he doesn’t  _ see  _ anything. Not even blackness, because his visual cortex doesn’t exactly function anymore. Nor do any of the others, really. He—well, he exists. Somehow. 

As far as he knows his body is still where he left it, in the tomb-looking containment hold that was built to house a crystal, but for all the difference it makes it might not be there at all. Adam  _ is  _ the Atlas now; where he once felt the pulse in his throat he feels the thrum of the engines, and laserfire on the particle shield like burns against his skin. The Galra don’t last long when they arrive, or so he concludes from the mingling of worry and smugness that can only belong to Sam. They come expecting the Earth to be as it was before the Kerberos mission, and so when the Atlas flies out to meet them they fall without a struggle. Without even a single casualty on the Garrison’s part, though Adam only knows this because Iverson shut himself in the barracks after everything was over and cried himself to sleep. Though Adam can neither see nor hear he senses feelings, if they’re strong enough—and that day the ship was trembling with relief, from Sam’s wife Colleen in the engine room to the MFE pilots in the hangars. 

And so, time goes on. Or at least he supposes it does; Adam feels nothing at all when the Atlas powers down, and he has no means to count the days that pass between flights. The Garrison builds no more battleships (due to ethical concerns, though there is no shortage of people willing to power them) and sends the Atlas to aid occupied planets once Earth’s defenses are strong enough. There are battles, many of them, but despite their victories Adam grows uneasy. From Sam and Colleen he learns it has been a year since the Atlas was launched, and in all that while there has been no word from their Katie—and nearly nothing from Matthew, save a message stating that he has not seen his sister for months. 

Adam worries, in what way he can...though his mind no longer perceives very much some piece of it is still intact, devoted to the memory of a dark-haired pilot lost near Pluto long ago. There is also fear, perhaps the one recollection from life that never fully left him: fear that the child he once bandaged and scolded and nursed through winter colds is suffering far away, alone in the void between galaxies where the Atlas cannot reach him. Now that it does not sleep the ship remembers Keith, hot-tempered and small and starry-eyed whenever he looked at Takashi, living alone in the desert and refusing to go to university no matter how Adam begged him to try.

But despite the gold ring still lying in his empty bunk the Atlas dares not think too much of Takashi. Takashi, who said goodbye to Sam and left no message for him. 

He has mourned already, for a sweetheart lost to death. Love no longer returned is a joy compared to  _ that _ , so Adam swallows his grief and goes on just as he did before. 

* * *

_ Pain.  _

_ It is all he knows, tearing through his body so fiercely that he gasps and falls to the ground. There are hands at his back, steadying him as he clutches at the memorial, and a photograph of the childhood friend who became the love of his life. His fiancé looks unchanged in the picture, brown of skin and hair and eyes, bespectacled as he was since he began the first grade. _

_ He blinks. It his own face he sees on the plate, not Takashi’s, and as he lifts his arms he finds there is only one—the right is missing, and still his limbs are heavier than he remembers them. Beside him there is a boy with a scar across his cheek, taller and stronger by far than the child who vanished four years ago— _

_ “Keith!” he cries, snatching him up with the one arm he still possesses. “Oh, you monkey—” _

_ As he laughs Keith’s eyes grow wide with shock, though Adam cannot tell why; not even Takashi ever used that old pet-name, and surely Keith doesn’t think he’s forgotten it. But his surrogate brother’s embarrassment does not distract him for long, and as he looks round the memorial hall he smiles at the sight of Sam’s little girl (not quite so little now, he thinks) and a woman with markings under her eyes. But he does not see the two cadets he had in his physics class the year he first began teaching, or the man who once knelt down at his feet and asked for his hand in marriage. _

_ “Where is he?” he shouts, taking Keith by the shoulders and looking up into his face. “Sam said he was safe—he promised, he promised Takashi was safe—” _

_ But then Adam knows nothing more, and the last the Atlas recalls of Keith is a look of complete bewilderment.  _

* * *

Six galaxies away, the Atlas wakes from a power blackout to three hundred frightened officers. From what it can guess the backup generators have been maintaining the ship, and as Adam comes back to life he feels his passengers’ hearts begin to slow. Sam is in the containment hold, desperately searching for injuries to his body--which he does not find, to the relief of all on board. Though the incident shakes even Iverson Adam is unconcerned, and eventually Sam attributes the blackout to chance and stops investigating the cause. The pilots continue their missions, and communications has little to do until a message comes from Earth. 

In the hold, Adam sleeps on. 

  
  
  
  



	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Adam regains consciousness.

After the blackout, Adam comes back to himself a little. It’s not as if he’s fully conscious again, not by a long shot, but he’s aware enough to communicate. Now  _ that  _ had been a shock; he hasn’t heard a word in over two years, and the first thing he realizes one fine Tuesday (Ryan Kinkade has strong feelings about Tuesdays, for some reason) is that Iverson is talking to him. 

“...don’t know what we’d have done, otherwise,” says the commander, and Adam can picture the look on his face as if he were standing beside him. “I don’t suppose you can hear me, but it’s been a privilege to know you, son. I hope that princess of theirs is as good as Sam says.”

He’s dimly aware that the last sentence makes no sense at all.  _ A princess? What has a princess got to do with me? _

Above him, the commander falls silent. 

“Adam?”

_ You  _ know  _ I can’t hear you, sir. Well, I can now, but— _

“ _ Adam! _ ”

_ Stop saying my name like the vine! I swear to God, that stopped being funny when Takashi— _

He hears the rustling of a bag, and then the beeping of a tablet as Iverson’s things go crashing to the floor. There’s the trill of some kind of messaging app, and then the sound of Sam Holt’s voice through a pair of broken speakers. 

“Mitch? I thought you were going to be in the hold with Adam until lunchtime.”

“I—you should get down here, Sam. I think he’s  _ awake. _ ”

* * *

As it turns out, he was communicating through Morse code. Besides the electrodes implanted in his brain, he was attached to all kinds of monitors before Sam put him under; somehow, he had managed to hijack one of the indicators and turn it off and on without even thinking about it. 

Stranger things have happened, he supposes, namely the turn of events that led to him spending over twenty months fueling a battlecruiser. But Iverson is right—though he can neither move nor see he is awake and aware, as he has not been since long before the Atlas was launched. And he can  _ speak _ , which is perhaps the greatest blessing; from what Colleen tells him it seems his brain has begun to function normally again, producing readings more typical to patients in comas than the near-flatlines they showed before. For the first time there is a distinction between Adam and the Atlas, and when he permits his thought to go out to the rest of the ship it seems that the Atlas has gained a will of its own. He doesn’t say so, though; when he rests the two are one again as they have been for years, and for all he knows he might fall asleep again any moment. 

People come down to talk to him, now that word has spread. He can still sense the crew’s thoughts, though not as keenly as he used to—but hearing them speak is better anyway, and that’s how he receives the news of Voltron’s return to Earth. All the paladins are whole and sound, including Keith and Takashi, and with them they’ve brought an honest-to-goodness ten-thousand-year-old princess. Apparently the one Iverson had mentioned, though Adam still doesn’t know what she has to do with him. 

He thinks again of the ring in his old quarters and sighs a little on the inside, shaking himself back to the present when he feels the Atlas laughing at him. 

“You couldn’t do that yesterday,” Adam tells it—which he knows, because he requested an old-fashioned clock to hang beside his containment chamber. “And stop laughing at me. I still don’t know how connected we are, and now it just feels like I’m laughing at myself.”

_ Atlas is awake, too. Adam is funny.  _

“Oh, I’m funny, am I?” he grumbles. “Fine, have it your way. I’m about to see my ex-fiance for the first time in five years—well, he’s about to see me, anyway—and I’m unconscious and dressed in hospital scrubs. I won’t even be able to look at him, and that’s if he wants to come down here.”

The Atlas solves two of these problems by sending him a swift image of himself from what appears to be the security camera by the door. As it happens, he’s not actually wearing the paper gown he had on the last time he looked in a mirror; someone has dressed him in blue pajamas in the meantime, with the Garrison’s insignia stitched on the breast pocket in orange. 

“Huh,” Adam says. “I guess I can see now. Can I look through any of the cameras on board, then?”

A second later he receives a series of pictures from what must be all corners of the ship at once: there’s James Griffin piling more spinach onto Rizavi’s plate in the canteen, Curtis Bradley doing stretches with Iverson in the gym—Sam and Colleen in the engine room, hand-in-hand and—

“All right, that’s enough of that,” he mutters, pulling up the feed from the bridge. “Where are we now?”

There isn’t a camera near enough to the map, so the Atlas simply tells him; they are about halfway through the Triangulum galaxy, and a two weeks’ journey from home. 

_ Takashi.  _

The Atlas sniggers at him. 

“Oh, shut up.”

* * *

Shiro wakes to darkness. 

For a moment he feels a sob in his throat, certain the weeks since his resurrection have only been a dream—and then there’s the flicker of a battery lamp in the corner, followed by Lance’s head of rumpled hair peering out of a blanket. Keith is fast asleep on a folding-cot beside him, and at the touch of the light on his face he burrows under his pillows.

“Are you okay?” asks Lance, pushing back the covers and coming to sit on the bed at Shiro’s left. “You really gave us a scare back by the chapel. Coran said you hugged Keith and started screaming your own name before going out like a light.”

“Did I?” Shiro doesn’t remember. All he can think of is a name-plate framed in bronze, and Adam’s stern face looking down from a wall of pilots lost during missions. “I was at the memorial, and Adam—”

“He’s not dead,” Lance interrupts. “Your fiance was Professor Walia, right? The first-year physics teacher? He isn’t dead.”

“Then why—” 

“I don’t really know. Something— _ something  _ happened, and they didn’t expect he’d survive, so they put up a plaque for him on the memorial. But he’s alive, on the Atlas.”

He can’t make sense of any of it—if Adam was well enough to go on the Atlas, why wasn’t his plaque taken down? And for that matter, why had he had one at all?

“What are you doing here?” he asks, still groggy from whatever tranquilizer the doctors had given him. Hopefully he’ll get a straight answer to that, at least. “And why is Keith on a cot? You should both be in bed, Lance. Don’t think I can’t see that chair you were sleeping in.”

“Keith didn’t want to leave you alone,” smiles Lance, speaking in a softer voice than Shiro’s ever heard from him. “But he wouldn’t have slept if he was the only one watching, so I came to sit with him.”

“Right,” Shiro mutters, already distracted by the pallor of his friend’s brown cheeks. He notices with a pang that Lance’s wrists have grown painfully thin; he hasn’t seen the red paladin out of his armor for longer than he can recall, but he’s certain his fingers weren’t always so slender. “Have you eaten since we landed, Lance? Rations, fruit, anything?”

“Yeah, we ate at the canteen,” comes the reply, followed by a grin. “It was breakfast-for-dinner tonight, with tater tots. Do you want me to make a run to the commissary to get you something? Curfew’s already in place, but it doesn’t really apply to us.”

“Maybe in a while.” He feels nauseous more than anything, but that’s more likely the fault of the needle in his arm; after realizing he no longer has his prosthesis he plucks out the line with his teeth, slumping back against the pillows once it’s out of his vein. “I’m too drowsy to eat right now, I think.”

“That’s okay,” soothes the younger boy. “I’ll wake up again if you need me.”

From the corner of his eye Shiro sees him glance at Keith, and wonders which of them Lance was really talking to. 

“Okay,” he yawns, settling back into his blankets. “I’ll see you in the morning, then.”

And then he’s asleep, and dreaming of Adam adrift in a field of stars. 

  
  
  



	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which the Atlas lands.

When Adam was a child, a character in one of his favorite stories had been a demon who slept for six months out of the year before waking in a fit of hunger. He feels a bit like that demon now, he thinks; unsure how long it’s been since he was last conscious, despite the cuckoo-clock he knows is chiming over his head every hour. They can’t have reached Earth yet, as the Atlas is still running at full power, but he can no longer access the video feeds to make sure. 

“I guess I’m asleep again,” he sighs, lamenting the silence. “Well, it was nice while it lasted.”

_ Atlas is sorry _ , says the ship.  _ Nearly hit by solar flares, and needed more power for the shields. Adam gave it.  _

“Don’t worry,” Adam soothes, speaking as gently as he used to do with the younger cadets. “You did what had to be done, buddy. I’m still here.”

_ Made you give up too much. Put you back in a coma.  _

He smiles.

“I wouldn’t be here if I minded, you know. I’d do it again in a heartbeat.”

* * *

Without Iverson’s daily visits to entertain him he spends a lot of time thinking, now that the Atlas can carry on by itself without much more than an extra dose of quintessence now and then. Most often he thinks of a village nestled between green hills, the first home he was parted from—of running wild with his sisters through an endless plain of strawberry fields, and tramping back at the end of the day with his mouth and hands stained pink. Sometimes he wishes he never left; the cliffs and little rivers of his childhood are far dearer to him than the Garrison ever was, and if he lets himself drift far enough he can still hear the roaring of the waterfalls, meeting the cool of the lake below with a cry. 

But his most treasured haven is gone beyond recall. If Adam returns there will be nobody to greet him, and he doesn’t think he can bear to have it tainted by loneliness.

It is on one such day (largely spent in longing, though for once the Atlas does not tease him for it) that he realizes the ship’s life support systems are no longer running; everyone is on the move, though there is no shadow of urgency. He wakes and prods the Atlas for answers, finding to his relief that they are safe and undergoing repairs in the largest hangar at the Garrison. One of the hulls was compromised by the flares—this he knows, because he feels it aching like a bruise in his left side—and there are hundreds of structural anomalies in the body of the Atlas itself, which have the engineers flummoxed as they poke and prod at the screens in the control room.

_ Atlas is changing, Pilot.  _

“I know,” Adam replies. It has something to do with the last time he went under; after whatever the Atlas took from him then it developed a character of its own, cheering him up when he grew too lonely and asking for his recollections of various people on board as it watched them going about their business. Its absolute favorite is Nadia Rizavi from the MFE squadron, who spends most of her time outside missions driving her friend Leifsdottir out of her wits. 

_ It feels strange.  _

“Does it hurt?” he asks, concerned. “Is there something broken? I don’t know how we could tell the engineers now that I can’t speak, but—”

_ It is more like a shifting, Pilot. Atlas is changing on the inside.  _

But beyond that it knows nothing more, so Adam settles in to wait until his perception returns. Surely it won’t be long; with the battlecruiser grounded it won’t need much from him, and hopefully,  _ hopefully _ —

_ Oh, Takashi,  _ says the Atlas, sighing in a poor imitation of Adam’s own voice while he splutters in indignation. 

“I haven’t seen the man in five years! Leave me alone!”

Predictably, the Atlas does no such thing. 

* * *

Later that night he wakes to find that he can hear again. The hum of the ship is strong and steady around him, and above his head the cuckoo-clock is steadily ticking away; when he rouses the Atlas he discovers that he can look through the cameras, and that the vessel is almost completely empty. The samples in the cargo hold have been carried off to the labs, and nothing living is roaming the halls but a spider that got in on somebody’s boot. The consoles on the bridge are dark and silent, and Adam feels a sudden urge to get up and walk around. 

_ You can try,  _ suggests the Atlas.  _ Pilot is better now. Try.  _

So he tries. But as ever he cannot feel his limbs at all, and after a while he stops and gazes through the feed at his own still body in the power chamber. With every pulse of his heart a rush of quintessence goes out to the rest of the ship, not enough to hurt him—but he is still thin and wan from twenty-seven months of confinement, and the legs that once carried him through brutal fitness drills look like sticks beneath his clothes. He knows he receives stimulation therapy to keep his muscles from atrophying, but there’s only so much it can do; he’ll be able to walk when he gets out of the hold, at least, so he tries not to worry. 

Strangely, his face looks exactly the same. Thinner, certainly, and pale enough to satisfy the aunts who once tried to rope him into a skin-lightening treatment when he was six—but still with its smooth blunt chin and high cheekbones, and the football scar at his hairline gleaming like a point of silver. They have even left his glasses on, besides keeping his brown hair cut short and his face clean-shaven. 

_ No, Pilot. Hair does not grow, anymore. But Sam insisted on the glasses.  _

“I’m grateful they did,” mutters Adam. He’s been nearsighted since before he learned how to read, and after twenty-four years of wearing them the spectacles feel like they’ve always been part of his nose and ears. Not even a full LASIK package could persuade him to part with them; it had been offered to all the graduating pilots in his year, but though his program coordinators had advised it he never went through with the surgery. 

_ Atlas thinks Takashi will be, too.  _

“I doubt it.”

_ Why? He loved you, Pilot. With all his heart.  _

“Not enough to keep him from leaving me. And—and in all the while since we landed, he hasn’t come—”

_ Pilot, we landed in the middle of the night. And it is not yet morning.  _

“...Oh. I—I didn’t realize—”

_ Sleep, Adam.  _ The Atlas is gentle now, no longer teasing.  _ He will come to you. Rest.  _

So he does. 

* * *

In the morning, Shiro finds himself back in front of the memorial. 

_ “We couldn’t launch the Atlas, Shiro. Not without a crystal.” _

The planet would have been annihilated without a battleship to protect it, they told him. And nothing except quintessence from a living body would do. 

_ “It was Adam who thought of it. And once he had the idea—he wouldn’t hear of anyone going in his place.” _

Adam—his darling, gentle, steadfast Adam—

_ “We put him under, and built a chamber to absorb the quintessence from his heart.” _

_ “Is he—is he—” _

_ “He’s been in a coma these last two years, Officer Shirogane. He was aware and communicating a few days before the solar flare, but after systems diverted power to the particle shield he went completely unresponsive. I’m so sorry, sir.” _

He thinks for one wild moment of a teacup crashing back into its saucer, and—

_ Don’t expect me to be here when you get back. _

_ — _ and breaks. 

  
  
  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Note: At this point the invasion of Earth never happened and never will, so Shiro & co. have a little while to rest. The Altean mech will show up eventually, but not just yet. 
> 
> Thank you so much for your kind kudos and comments!! They really mean a lot! <3


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Shiro reminisces.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> First of all, a HUGE thanks to everyone who gave this a try; kudos and comments are the nourishment upon which I thrive tbh. I'm all caught up replying now (I don't think I've missed any, but I will go back and check) and honestly, I love reading your feedback so much. <3 <3 <3  
> Now, without further ado...chapter 4.

Shiro remembers the morning he first saw Adam as if it was yesterday. 

He was late to his third-year flight safety class, thanks to the party Matt made him go to the night before (something about sergeant Ryu deciding to give a take-home final, though he doesn’t recall exactly). Shiro had been only fifteen, and just as short and scrawny as his xenogeology-obsessed best friend; he hadn’t even crossed five-foot-eight at the time. Matt of course never did, but that’s beside the point. 

He was late, and dashing down the halls until he ran headlong into a slender cadet dressed in a uniform identical to his—but on the newcomer’s shoulders the Garrison clothes looked nothing like the eyesore they were on Shiro and Matt, suiting the hue of his skin as if they were cut and dyed with him in mind. 

“I’m so sorry!” Shiro cried, picking up his notebooks and stuffing them into his bag. “I wasn’t looking where I was going—”

“No, it’s my fault,” came the sheepish reply, touched by a breath of sweet accent that stopped him dead in his tracks. “I was looking at the map. I’m supposed to be in third-year flight safety, but I can’t find the classroom.”

“So am I!” said Shiro, though it came out more like a gasp. “I haven’t seen you before. Are you a transfer?”

“I am,” answered the other boy. “I just started this week, and I don’t know where anything is—would you mind terribly if I—”

Needless to say, Shiro did  _ not _ mind, and he marched into flight safety five minutes later with Adam trailing behind him. Later that day the duo joined up with Matt, who took one look at the penmanship in Adam’s workbook and promptly decided to adopt him. 

“He’s my calculus partner now,” he announced, rummaging through Adam’s messenger bag. “Your handwriting is so  _ pretty _ , Adam. My sister could learn a thing or two from you.”

Shiro had pouted all the way through lunch. 

“Cheer up,” whispered Matt, nudging him before they parted ways outside the canteen. “You’ve got the simulators next, right? There’s your chance to impress him.”

As it turned out, the class did not end with Adam being impressed; rather than hanging back he volunteered to go first and broke Shiro’s record by twelve marks, leaving the boy in question so dazzled that he crashed and came dead last. 

“Well, you tried,” said Matt that night, consoling Shiro in their dormitory with a tub of stolen ice cream. Shiro took a spoonful and swallowed it with a groan. 

“I’m an idiot. He’s never going to notice me.”

But he did, and the following summer Shiro pulled Adam out of the Garrison’s end-of-year cotillion and kissed him in the moonlight until Iverson showed up and gave them both detention. 

* * *

“Can I—can I—see him?”

They’re finishing a meeting now, Sam and Sanda and Iverson with Shiro and the rest of the paladins. The debriefing went off without a hitch; Shiro gave them a summary of what they’ve been doing in space, and after that Sam and a younger private relay their account of the Galra’s short-lived assault on Earth. They tell him how Adam gave himself up for the Atlas not two weeks before the attack, saving the planet and everyone on it with his sacrifice. Keith keeps a hand on his shoulder all the while, and Shiro notices it trembling. Adam was the only family either of them were returning to, after all. 

“See him, Officer Shirogane?” Sanda asks. 

He blinks. 

“I—Admiral, you know what he was to me. Please—”

“I don’t see why not,” Sam interrupts, throwing a glare at the admiral. “Everyone and their dog went to the hold to talk to him while he was conscious. There’s certainly no reason Shiro shouldn’t go.”

“Were you waiting all morning to make that pun, sir?” mutters the private. “I know Mrs. Holt took Bae Bae down when she went to sit with him once.”

“It might be difficult, Shiro,” says Iverson, looking kindly across the table. “He most likely won’t realize you’re there.”

“With all due respect, sir, I don’t  _ care. _ I  _ have  _ to—”

“All right,” sighs Sanda, putting an end to the conversation. “After this meeting, Officer Holt or Commander Iverson will take you aboard the Atlas to see Lieutenant General Walia. Now, the coalition—”

* * *

Strangely, the memory that’s faded the most is the one of the day he proposed. 

It was their seventh Christmas together, if the fourth-year Garrison prom can be counted as their first. Shiro was twenty-four and sweating where he sat by the tree in their apartment, while Adam was in the kitchen (he had forbidden Shiro from boiling so much as an egg the moment they moved into the flat) and coaxing Keith to try a bit of roast pork. 

“I don’t  _ want _ pork,” Keith complained. “We’ve had curry every year until now. There’s nothing wrong with curry, and I  _ know _ you made koftas yesterday. I don’t want to eat something else just because it’s Christmas.”

“Religiously, I’m free to celebrate Christmas,” Adam announced. “And so is Takashi, so we might as well go all-out. Didn’t you have a christening, Keith? You should be more excited.”

“I haven’t been to church since they made me go at the home,” said the teenager. “Tell me you have rasgullas, at least.”

Adam did have rasgullas, to say nothing of the tin of rice pudding hidden behind them in the fridge; he had a sweet tooth the size of Canada, though he always tried to deny it. While Keith was busy eating the rasgullas with syrup, Shiro slipped into his bedroom and emerged with a small red jewelry box in the pocket of his coat. 

At some point, Adam found the empty container of sweets and chased Keith around the apartment, shrieking in a mixture of Hindi and English that set Shiro’s heart fluttering in his chest. He remembers watching his surrogate little brother leaping over the couches, cackling like a madman as Adam ran after him with a ladle—but the rest of the night is a blur, because he fell onto one knee then and there (tripping Keith on his way down) and choked out his proposal with tears already pouring from his eyes. 

Adam had said yes. 

Shiro doesn’t remember much, after that. He was too far gone in his dreams of a wedding, and now he wishes he’d dreamed a little more of the joy they already had.

* * *

“You don’t have to come with me, Keith. You heard Iverson—he won’t know you, and—”

“And you heard  _ me _ ,” says his brother, unimpressed. “Adam once did the Heimlich maneuver on me to get a cherry stone out of my throat. I’m going.” 

Keith gets off his bed and goes out into the hall, checking to make sure it’s deserted before dragging Shiro behind him. The paladins have been given a set of barracks adjoining a common room, much like the quarters they had back on the Castle of Lions. Lance and Hunk are sharing, as are Keith and Shiro; Coran, Allura, and Pidge have their own, although Shiro’s fairly sure the Garrison trio are all sleeping in Pidge’s room. Somehow he and Keith don’t run into any of the others as they make their way to the next building, though this is probably Lance’s fault—the first thing he did upon their return was challenge James Griffin to a shooting match, and of course Hunk and Pidge had gone around raising a betting pool for the outcome.

But whatever the reason, they reach the hangars without meeting a soul but Iverson on the way. When he opens the gates Shiro takes in a breath, because the Atlas is one of the largest ships he’s ever seen in his life: second only to the Castle, and easily twice the size of the heaviest Galra cruisers. Somehow it seems like the kind of vessel Adam would like, white and sleek and almost reminiscent of the old-fashioned moon rockets he used to draw in his notebooks.

How much has the Atlas drained from him?

“This way, Shiro.”

Iverson leads them to an airlock and opens it with a facial scanner, revealing a pitch-black hallway that illuminates at the sound of his footsteps. On the inside the Atlas is an endless maze of corridors and sharp turnings, and they walk for five minutes in silence before they come to one of the lowermost holds. Its door is already alight, with a pale-blue panel shining like a beacon in the darkness. 

“I’m opening the door now,” says Iverson, probably for Shiro’s benefit; he nods and takes a moment to gather himself before watching the lock click into the upright position. The door is a plug of solid iron nearly a foot thick, and equipped with an electric current strong enough to kill an elephant in case of attempted break-ins. 

“What’s that for?” whispers Keith. 

“Sabotage,” grunts the commander. “Adam suggested it himself before he went in, in case we were ever boarded. Any injury to the hardware would compromise the ship completely, and if something were to happen to him I don’t think anyone on board could make it out alive. He’s under heavier guard than the bridge and the control rooms.”

Iverson pushes the door back on its hinges, and then they’re standing inside. The hold is mostly empty; there’s a rectangular vault in the center of the room, with tubes and pipes feeding in and out on either side. Apart from that there’s only a security camera mounted on the wall, and a cuckoo-clock by the vault that Shiro recognizes as the one that used to hang in Sam’s old office. He turns his eyes back to the containment chamber, where—

“Oh,” he chokes, clutching Keith by the arm. “It looks like a tomb.”

He goes to the vault on halting feet, clutching at the lid as he looks into Adam’s face for the first time in nearly three years. Two electrodes rest above his forehead, glowing blue like the piece of crystal in Allura’s crown; on his chest some sort of monitor beeps alongside a siphon, which swallows a bit of silver quintessence with every throb of his heart. Worse still is the unnatural thinness of his body—the light on his cheekbones throws them into relief like boulders beneath his skin, and under his shirt the lines of his ribs are plain and clear as day. Shiro stares in horror for a minute before scrambling at the buttons on the console, turning to Keith in anguish as his eyes begin to blur. 

“Open it— _ open it, please— _ ”

Iverson enters a sequence into the screen, and an instant later the panel of bulletproof glass over Adam’s body slides open. Shiro doesn’t remember moving; one moment he was standing next to the chamber, and the next he was almost inside, desperately grasping at Adam’s hands and sobbing out his name. Keith comes forward to hold him still, keeping his brother from touching the ports in Adam’s arms—for a second Shiro nearly lunges to tear them out, despite the knowledge that it would do no good. 

“Wake up, sweetheart,” he cries, bringing the cold fingers one by one to his lips. “I’m so sorry, Adam. Come back. Come back,  _ come back to me! _ ”

When he almost dislodges the siphon the panel closes automatically, and he lifts his voice and screams until Keith and the commander gently lead him away. He can’t see how either of them could bear to look at Adam lying there, how Sam had permitted him to sacrifice himself at all, how  _ nobody  _ had tried to stop him. 

But nothing could have held him back, Shiro knows. After all, he is just the same; it’s what first drew them together, and then what drove them apart. 

_ This is  _ nothing  _ like your decision to go to Kerberos, Takashi.  _

“Was he afraid?” Shiro asks, after Iverson steers him into the empty commissary for a glass of water. “When they—when they did it?”

“I’d eat my hat if he was,” grunts the older man. “Half the faculty offered to take his place. I offered to do it myself, but he wouldn’t hear of it. But then you were gone, Kogane was gone, and last I heard his sisters were killed in action overseas. He didn’t have much left.”

* * *

_ “Takashi, makhnaa?” _

_ “Mm?” _

_ “When did you know you loved me, sweetheart?” _

_ “There was never a moment, really. I think I always have.” _

 


	5. Chapter 5

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which the conflict is revealed.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Holy muffins, you guys are amazing. I am so sorry I haven't answered all your comments this chapter, but I'll definitely respond to them by the next one! Thank you all so much for your support!
> 
> Now, without further ado...more adashi, and a bit of klance.

It’s a little-known fact that Adam is a year younger than Takashi. 

When they met he was only fourteen, alight with wonder over living in the States and happy beyond measure that he found two friends the very week he arrived. At the beginning he hadn’t really meant to get into piloting; there weren’t any scholarships open for engineers, so he applied for a seat in the prospective cargo class and planned to study engineering on the side. Of course, fate (in other words, an overexcited Takashi Shirogane) had other plans. On the day Takashi first saw Adam fly in the simulators he insisted he stay in the piloting program, and at the end of the year they made it into the fighter class together. 

That night he threw them a party in the dorm room he shared with Matt, raiding the kitchens with his next-door neighbor before sneaking up with four crates full of snacks and enough juice-boxes to supply a kindergarten for weeks. Adam barely remembers anything from that evening, except that there was too much dancing and eventually a pillow fight and two rounds of truth or dare, but he remembers the next morning as if it were yesterday—remembers waking up on the floor with Matt sprawled over his lap, and Takashi’s soft breath ebbing and flowing like a whisper against his cheek. They had fallen asleep arm-in-arm, and the moment he glanced down to find Takashi on his chest he knew that he loved the older boy far past the bounds of friendship. 

Their fourth year passed in a whirlwind after that, and ended in an alcove behind the ballroom with three red roses and a kiss. And of course Iverson, who threatened to have them cleaning the canteen (for  _ “inappropriate displays of affection, cadets” _ ) but let them off with unsupervised inventory duty instead: Takashi still counts it as their first date, since there wasn’t much in the storage rooms to discourage a few more kisses. 

“Are we dating?” Takashi asked, at the back end of the lunch line the next day. “I—I really want us to be, Adam. I think I’ve liked you since the day you first beat me in the simulators.”

“I never really thought I’d date anyone, especially not here,” confessed Adam. “But I like you too, Takashi.”

The word seemed far too pale for what he felt _ ,  _ he thinks, even then.  _ Like  _ was for the little girl who once lived in the bungalow across the river from his, the childhood playmate who still holds the title of dearest friend in his heart. But it was not enough for Takashi, whose laughter put a phantom weight on Adam’s left ring finger long before they dared talk of  _ love.  _

He thinks of something he read in a novel long ago, and sighs. 

_ She vanished into her rich house, into her rich, full life, leaving Gatsby—nothing. He felt married to her, that was all.  _

Takashi came to the Garrison as most of the fighter pilots did, desperately reaching for every planet in the heavens but the one beneath his feet. It was with the same unchanging intent that he pursued Adam, never mind the fact that the younger boy belonged to him from the start. He thought of his friend like he did about distant suns, which were warm and lovely and colorful and just too far to grasp. But he never quite respected or cared for the life Adam had chosen to lead, as a professor of engineering after graduating with the highest piloting scores the institute had ever seen. 

They had something of a row when Adam made his choice, and it was one of the only times they ever quarreled before the sorrow of Kerberos. Takashi was convinced he was wasting his talent, but in the turmoil of Takashi’s diagnosis missions were the last thing Adam had on his mind. Certainly it didn’t help that he received news of his father’s death while sitting at his boyfriend’s bedside. 

After that he could no longer think of voluntarily putting his own life at risk, not when he had Takashi to worry about and family still living overseas. So Adam stayed with his feet planted firmly on the ground, and watched Takashi challenge the cosmos with pride and fear in his heart. After all, he never really wanted to fly beside him anyway; the quiet life of a teacher suited him much better, and he was more at home with a book of messy equations than he ever was in a plane. Takashi didn’t bring up the question of Adam’s career again until they broke up, but he never really got over it—he set his course for the edge of the solar system still angry that Adam’s flight suit was gathering dust in storage, refusing to accept that his fiance had happily decided to leave it there. 

And then, of course, there was Keith. 

Adam was only eighteen when Takashi lugged him home, and still figuring out bills and taxes and adult life as a whole—but Keith was twelve and thin as a rake with bandaged knees and elbows, and Adam’s heart went out to him from the first. Though he had a dorm at the Garrison Takashi stepped in and applied for guardianship, and eventually Keith decided to live in the flat’s extra bedroom as something of a little brother to them both. He was probably the only reason Takashi ever liked the idea of Adam teaching; even Takashi, in love with the stars as he was, had thought of what might happen to Keith if he died on a mission. 

But then again, that didn’t last. Keith was old enough to look after himself when Kerberos came around, and so Takashi left. 

Adam doesn’t regret what he said in the instructor’s lounge that day, and now he doesn’t even regret that Takashi decided to go. He became a hero, after all; what could Adam possibly say in the face of that?

* * *

After stumbling out of the commissary Shiro spends the rest of the day alone in his room, politely refusing lunch and dinner until Pidge comes in and throws a box of takeout at his face. He suspects it’s because he used to bundle her off to bed whenever she fell asleep in some odd corner of the castle, and feels a bit of gladness that it’s her and not the boys who’ve come to check on him; he can’t even look at Keith without feeling guilty for how much he’s worrying him, and Lance and Hunk are so kind and well-meaning that he’ll just start crying again if he sees them. Pidge’s form of support is much more aggressive, and so exactly like Keith’s used to be that it cheers him up a little.

Shiro thanks her and takes the food, and then he and Pidge sit together in silence for a while: Shiro at the desk while he eats his fish and chips, and Pidge bouncing up and down on his bed until he’s done.

“It isn’t as if he’s dead, you know,” she says gently. “Or quintessence-drained like the Alteans from Lotor’s colony. I’ve been talking to Allura, and she says when the Garrison gets a crystal they can just take him out.”

Shiro flinches, thinking of Adam’s still face and a Morse translator that hasn’t turned on for weeks.

“Can they? They don’t know how much of him is still left in his body, even. He’s—he’s  _ split  _ between himself and the Atlas, and if he’s separated from it he might not ever come back all the way.”

There isn’t much that Pidge can say to that, and after a while she puts a hand on his shoulder and gets up to leave. But he hugs her first and promises not to stay in too long, because even after all this time she is still his favorite paladin; to lighten the mood he tells her so, and makes her swear not to breathe a word to Lance and Keith. Of course her being his favorite doesn’t change the fact that Pidge (in Lance’s words) is a “tiny gremlin who thrives on wreaking havoc,” so she runs off down the hall screaming it where all the others can hear her.  

Somewhere in the back of his mind, Shiro hears Adam laughing.

* * *

Later that evening he goes to the roof to look at the stars, breathing a sigh of relief when he sees them twinkling through the clouds. Their light is much starker in space, he thinks, cruel and chilly and far too close for comfort. But tonight he finds that they they hold no charm for him, so he looks away and searches the grounds for bits of treasured memory: nearly twelve years’ worth of it, from the day he came to the Garrison fresh out of elementary school to the morning he set off with Matt and Sam aboard the  _ Theia-Selene.  _ From where he stands he can see the spot where Adam found his pet snake, and the clump of brambles where they once hid from Sanda after she almost caught them sneaking back from a ride on Shiro’s hoverbike. Next to the canteen there’s a covered dumpster Matt jumped into for a dare when they were fifteen, and the supply truck Adam once hotwired just because he wanted to see if he could; on the little ridge overlooking the training grounds he can just make out the tree where he found an eagle’s nest, and then the little desert garden where he first told Adam he loved him. 

He could go on forever, he thinks, if the face of his fiance sleeping in the Atlas didn’t haunt him quite so much. 

Out of the stillness he hears the sound of footsteps, and then the door to the staircase below creaks open, admitting a figure dressed in red pajamas and another dressed in blue. Shiro’s eyes fly open in shock as he sees that Keith is  _ laughing,  _ leading Lance by the hand as he makes for the east side of the terrace. Neither of them have seen Shiro yet, but he hears the shyness in Lance’s voice and the answering timidity in Keith’s as he offers Lance his sweater—if this meeting is anything of the nature Shiro suspects it is they won’t appreciate an audience, and he notices too late that there’s no way for him to make it off the roof unseen. 

“Keith!” he calls, resigning himself to the fact that his brother will probably make him pay for this later. “What are you guys doing out here?”

Their faces fall as if someone had tried to feed them Coran’s paladin lunch, and Shiro barely stops himself from snickering—but then they realize that he’s out of his room for the first time since Iverson took him aboard the Atlas, and race each other over the solar panels until they’re standing beside him. 

“How are you feeling?” asks Lance, setting a tentative hand on his arm. 

“Better, I guess,” he shrugs. “Better than I was this morning, anyway.”

Keith narrows his eyes. 

“There’s something you’re not telling me,” he announces, poking Shiro in the side. “What is it?”

For a moment he looks at Lance as if regretting his decision to question Shiro in the other boy’s presence, but Shiro doesn’t mind; his heart has been achingly heavy with secrets for over the past two years, and not so long ago Lance was the only one of the team who could hear him from the astral plane. He can trust the younger man with his life, he knows, so he motions the others to sit with him as he looks out into the shadows. 

“It’s the fight I had with Adam before I left for Kerberos.”

“You fought?” asks Keith, surprised. “I mean, I know he didn’t want you to go, but—”

“It was more than that, a lot more. That fight was a long time coming, now that I think about it—and all my fault, too,” he whispers. “Adam wasn’t to blame for any of it.”

“Start from the beginning,” suggests Lance, who has made himself comfortable on Keith’s shoulder. “That’s what my mother always used to say when something was upsetting me.”

Shiro smiles. “That’s some solid advice, Lance. But it’s a long story, and it’s already getting cold out here.”

“I think it’ll do you good if you just tell us, Shiro,” comes the soft reply. “It’s unhealthy to keep these things bottled up inside for so long. We’ll go away if it gets to be too much, but you should try talking about what’s bothering you if you can.”

Somehow he finds that against all reason, he can. 

So he does. 

* * *

It was six months into the Kerberos mission when Sam finally confronted him about Adam. 

Matt had been tiptoeing around the subject for weeks, increasingly annoyed by Shiro’s diversions and insistence that he didn’t need to get involved; but at last the engineer lost his patience and and gave the job to his father, who took it up most thoroughly while they were cataloguing samples one day in the hold of the  _ Theia-Selene. _

“I know you probably don’t want to talk about why you argued with him, son,” he had said, putting a greenish ice-crystal into the freezer. “But relationships take work, and all you’ve sent that poor boy in all this while are status notifications. And not particularly affectionate ones either, if I’m to believe whatever Matthew learns from his snooping.”

“It’s better this way. He—he can get over me, and get on with his life without me weighing him down.”

“Get on with his life?” asked Sam, bemused. “What on earth do you mean? He agreed to  _ marry  _ you—”

“I mean he’ll go back to piloting,” Shiro muttered. “He had the best scores in our year, and he threw it all over to be a teacher after my diagnosis. Adam deserves more than giving up his youth for a husband who’s going to be an invalid by thirty, so we broke it off. That’s all.”

“Correct me if I’m wrong,” the older man persisted, “but didn’t Major Walia start teaching right before you graduated? I thought you were diagnosed long after that.”

“He was offered a student-teaching position with the professor who supervised his thesis, so of course he took it, but he wouldn’t have  _ stayed _ there if he hadn’t thought I needed someone at home while the treatments were going on. And then there was Keith, and it made sense for one of us to stay back from missions until he turned eighteen—but Sam _ ,  _ it’s been six years! Keith’s nearly of age and  _ still— _ ”

“And what, pray tell, does the man you profess to love think of the matter?” Sam looked decidedly unimpressed. 

“Adam keeps saying he’s happy where he is, but—”

“What makes you so certain he’s not?”

Shiro hadn’t been able to answer that last, and after a night of contemplation he got up bright and early, determined to make amends with Adam in his daily afternoon message. Sam and Matt both applauded his decision, and even helped their pilot compose a properly remorseful love-letter pleading forgiveness; Shiro had left it by the communications system, ready to transcribe the moment they returned from the ice collection Sam scheduled just after lunch. 

Adam never received that letter. And even now, Shiro can’t bear to think about why. 

* * *

_ “Strip their belongings, Jorvak, and get them into prisoners’ attire.” _

_ “What’s that?” _

_ “Looks like a—” _

_ “No—no—it’s all I have left of him, please don’t take it, please I’ll do anything—” _

_ “A marriage ring, maybe? I haven’t seen this kind of material since Oleg-229. Do you think the commander would let me keep it?” _

_ “I don’t see why not. Move on, filth. You aren’t getting this back.” _

_ “No, please—” _

_ “Be quiet,  _ champion.  _ I can’t imagine you’ll miss it very much, where you’re going.” _

  
  
  
  
  
  



	6. Chapter 6

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Adam schemes, Shiro worries, and there is a lot of texting.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> You guys, I have no words. Thank you so, so much for all your love.
> 
> WITHOUT FURTHER ADO...fluff, fluff, more fluff, and Keith.

Adam remembers the day Takashi came home with Keith as if it were yesterday.

It was the first Friday of June and a teachers’ day off for the Garrison, so Adam had decided to spend his free afternoon watching movies on the sofa. Takashi had gone recruiting at the local elementary schools and wouldn’t return until the evening, so Adam put on a pot of pasta for dinner and logged into Netflix while steadfastly ignoring the tests he had to grade. He nearly made it all the way through the first Kingsman film before Takashi opened the door and ushered in a small (and very dusty) child about half his height. To date, that wasn’t the strangest thing Takashi had dropped on him, now that he thinks about it. _That_ was the day Adam arrived in Takashi’s dorm to find two eagle chicks swaddled up in his bed, and Takashi himself jumping all over the room in a panic while the birds just sat and stared at him.

The kid stared at Adam in much the same way, big-eyed and frightened like a suddenly-displaced baby animal. Adam stared back and tried to figure out if Takashi wanted to keep him. It wasn’t as if he minded, but still he highly doubted that two teenage boys could take sufficient care of a child; after all, they were scarcely more than children themselves.

Then he went into the kitchen and came out with two steaming plates.

“So...alfredo?”

As it turned out, Keith really liked alfredo. Adam made excellent alfredo, because _somebody_ had to be a competent cook in households that contained a record-breaking pilot or two. By the transitive property, Keith also liked Adam, and settled into their lives as if he had always belonged there. It was some comfort to learn that he wasn’t nearly as young as he looked—twelve and a half when Adam initially thought he was closer to ten—but he doubts it would have mattered anyway. He was theirs from the first, and barely two weeks later he grew confident enough in them both to protest when Adam made brussels sprouts and ask for leftovers instead.

Neither of his guardians had ever been prouder in their lives. Takashi may have taken the opportunity to tell Keith he could forget about growing any taller if he wouldn’t eat his vegetables. Adam (who was “ _absolutely not setting a bad precedent, Takashi, thank you very much, because sprouts are terrible anyway and I_ told _you not to buy them”_ ) got out of his chair and heated the soup in the fridge.

But it hurts Adam still to remember how simple it was in the beginning. His eighteen-year-old self had it all, he thinks: students he loved and an almost-fiance who adored him, to say nothing of a tiny and often bewildered Keith who thought his fists were good solutions to his problems. He had family living then, too; the stroke that killed his father was nearly two months off at the time, and his sisters were still abroad for the extraction operation that eventually took all three of them just before Sam came back from space.

Is there _anything_ left to him now?

 _Yes, Pilot,_ reproves the Atlas, shaking him out of his reverie. _Your own self._

It seems to mean something by this, but Adam can’t tell what.

“What are you talking about?”

 _You had no idea of your own worth before you came to Atlas_ , it sighs. _Pilot is more than the power that keeps Atlas alive. More than the man who loved Takashi. More than the man who loved the little angry one, Keith. More even than the one they love in return, Adam. Though there is not more than that, Atlas thinks. Love is a funny thing, weak and strong both. But Pilot was never weak, or poor._

“My mother used to call me her strawberry boy,” Adam laughs. “I was hers, too. And Dad’s. And my sisters’.”

 _Atlas is glad you came. Keep you safe from the world a little, and maybe from the handsome one too._ It sounds a little sly, and Adam stifles a groan.

“All right, I’ll bite. What aren’t you telling me?”

 _Pilot can see past views from the camera, you know_ , sings the ship. _Adam slept for almost sixteen hours. Somebody came to see you in the meanwhile—_

“You’re telling me this _now?_ ” he shrieks, plunging into the hold’s security camera and tearing through its footage. “What time is it anyway? Four in the afternoon? Of course he came at the bloody crack of dawn when I’d be out cold, he _would_ — _why_ I agreed to marry a man who thinks getting up before seven is an achievement, I’ll never know—”

He stops in his tracks, because there he is. His Takashi.

The pain of seeing him is almost as bad as the pain of worrying about him, because _his arm is gone._ Sam had failed to mention that, thinks Adam furiously, and so had the Atlas. There’s also a nasty-looking scar across the bridge of his nose, and the hair that was once as black as soot is the color of driven snow. He’s shaking as he enters the hold with Iverson, and behind them is a very nervous-looking Keith, who’s grown at least six inches in the time he was away.

“Huh,” says Adam. “I guess Takashi was wrong. He did grow taller.”

But then Iversons opens the viewing panel over Adam’s body, and Takashi is almost inside: cradling Adam to his chest and crying, kissing his nose and hands and fingers and then his pallid lips as he begs him to open his eyes. Adam can’t take any joy at all in the proof that Takashi still cares, because his darling is _hurting—_ he’ll shake Sam like an Etch-A-Sketch the _moment_ he gets out of here, for letting Takashi into the hold when Adam couldn’t respond to him—

_He loves you still._

Adam hadn’t known that battlecruisers could be smug. “Couldn’t you have done _anything_ to let him know I’m not actually dead? You can use my Morse interpreter, can’t you? Why didn’t you just hijack it and write a message pretending to be me? You have complete access to my thoughts and quintessence, and you can’t do _one_ thing for me—”

If ships could glare at their unconscious power sources, the Atlas does it then. Adam isn’t really sure how to describe the glare. He’s not quite sure he wants to.

_He left Adam. Needed to be sorry. Just a little._

Adam gives up, because how does one go about arguing with sentient spaceships anyway? Voltron was supposedly sentient, according to Sam. Takashi probably fights with his lion on the daily with how stubborn he usually is, he thinks.

_Go back to sleep, Pilot. So much remembering has tired you._

“Fine. But if you don’t make some kind of commotion the moment I get up so Takashi can get down here, I’m telling Sam to take me out of the hold. We’ll see how you like that.”

_Oh, shut up. Adam will do no such thing._

“You can’t use my comebacks on me! We had a deal!”

 _Oh, Takashi_ —

“I really do hate you sometimes.”

*    *    *

Shiro is eating breakfast in the canteen with Allura when Iverson drops by.

“So,” he says, without any kind of preamble. “According to Kogane and Hernández, you’re not a paladin anymore.”

He nods; there’s no point in denying it, though he doesn’t see where Iverson could possibly be going with this.

“We have simulators,” Iverson grumbles. “For the Atlas.”

Shiro drops his knife. “You—you mean you want me to—”

“You’re the best we ever had besides Adam, Shiro, and he’s not getting back into commission anytime soon. The mustachioed fellow—pardon me, Princess, your advisor—he assured me your reflexes are no worse for having to use a prosthesis.”

“That’s true,” he replies. “But I don’t exactly have one anymore. Keith cut it off months ago.”

Iverson lifts an eyebrow.

“It’s complicated,” says Shiro lamely. “He had to.”

“Be that as it may, do you _want_ to try?”

He doesn’t even have to think about the answer.

_“Yes.”_

*    *    *

“Pilot of the Atlas, huh?” says Keith that night as they’re getting ready for bed. “Do you think you can? It’s almost as big as the Castle was.”

“I have to get an arm first,” Shiro reminds him. “I can’t really pilot with only one.”

It was always Adam who reminded Keith to look and think before leaping, he remembers. But he did so much more than that, Shiro knows—nobody was ever half so good at keeping him in his bed when he had a cold, or cheering him up when something had upset him.

Before he left for Kerberos, mornings in their flat had usually gone like this: Shiro woke up at five and got Keith ready for school, taking him to the Garrison two hours early for drills while Adam was still asleep. Adam usually got up about an hour after they left, and made three lunches that would still be hot when noon rolled around; at about eight o’clock he left to teach his first class of the day, and then the apartment stood empty until Shiro got back at half-past two.

On one particular Thursday Keith had refused to go with Shiro for drills, claiming exhaustion from Dos Santos’s slavedriving the afternoon before. Shiro had been surprised, but left without thinking too much of it; though Keith might have been a passionate pilot he was still a teenager, and definitely in need of a little more rest now and then—so when Adam texted him a little while to say he was calling in sick, Shiro was thoroughly confused.

 

**_my sunshine_ **

[7:05] moonlight do you think you can get lunch in the commissary today

[7:05] keith and i are calling in sick

**_takashi s._ **

[7:10] oh my god is he okay

[7:11] I knew something was wrong he loves drilling

[7:11] wait honey you were fine when I left, what happened?

[7:12] I can leave right now to come back and take care of you guys

[7:14] im emailing sanda now, i’ll be home in 15 minutes

[7:15] stay in bed

 

**_my sunshine_ **

[7:15] no no nono we’re not sick!

[7:16] we’re both fine takashi please don’t worry

[7:16] it’s the 5th anniversary of the day keith’s dad died.

[7:16] He didn’t really feel up to classes today.

 

**_takashi s._ **

[7:18] then i definitely should be home right now

[7:18] what kind of guardian am i i completely forgot the date

[7:19] im coming home anyway sunshine, thanks for telling me <3

 

**_my sunshine_ **

[7:20] actually i think you should leave it to me maybe?

[7:22] I have,,, something of a plan

[7:22] I’ll let Keith sleep for a little longer tho, he’s really tired.

[7:22] also love can you find matt and ask him to sub for me today??

[7:23] katie melted his phone last week and he still doesn’t have a new one

[7:23] tell him ill give him chhole if he does

[7:24] <3

****

**_takashi s._ **

[7:27] im on the way to sam’s lab rn, I’ll tell you what he says

[7:28] also, i love you so so so much Adam

[7:29] I know you’re going to be worrying about keith all day but if anything gets too much

[7:29] please call and let me know okay?

[7:30] i’ll come right home, doesn’t matter what I’m doing

 

**_my sunshine_ **

[7:30] okay, I promise :* I love you too

**_takashi s._ **

[7:31] :*

 

Following this rather cryptic conversation, Shiro let himself into the Holts’ research facility and made a beeline for Matt’s office, where the other boy usually hid himself before the start of the workday. He found his friend spinning around in the blue chair next to his computer, trying to balance a pen on the end of his nose.

“Matt.”

“At your service,” sang the researcher, dropping his pen. “What is it?”

“Can you substitute for Adam today?” asked Shiro. “Keith isn’t feeling well and Adam stayed home to take care of him.”

Matt squinted at him. “Maybe I can, for a price. Adam does know we have way more faculty here than we need, right? Literally anyone could take his classes today.”

“He says he’ll give you _chhole_ if you do,” the pilot sighed. “If that’s not enough, I don’t—”

“Whoa there, nobody said anything about turning down Adam’s _chhole_ ,” interrupted Matt. “Consider it done. And hey, isn’t he making aloo chaat tomorrow? If he needs me to sub again I’ll—”

“Matt, no.”

*    *    *

After telling Adam that his classes were taken care of Shiro went back to work, and didn’t look at his phone again until around nine-thirty. When he opened his lockscreen he found seven unread messages, which didn’t surprise him; Adam had probably texted now and then to say how Keith was doing, so Shiro selected the app and gaped in bewilderment when he saw that all the notifications had come from his next-door neighbor, a doctoral student at the nearby university.

 

**_James K. Chiu_ **

[8:40] so uh I don’t mean to alarm you or anything

[8:40] but there are some weird noises coming from your apt???

[8:40] I know you’re at work but Keith is still there and he’s shouting

[8:41] also I’m pretty sure I heard some china breaking

[8:49] does Keith fence? I’m guessing not.

[8:55] You may want to come save your boyfriend.

[8:56] I think Keith just decked him with a ruler or something.

****

**_takashi s._ **

[9:37] Oh God. Thank you for letting me know.

 

Shiro mopped a bead of sweat from his forehead and pulled up Keith’s messaging icon, which was a small picture of a cottonmouth viper with “snek” written across it in orange Comic Sans.

**_takashi s._ **

[9:37] Keith Kogane what on earth are you doing

[9:38] james texted to tell me you were yelling and breaking things??

[9:38] also he said you decked adam which I _know_ you wouldn’t do

[9:39] keith answer me this instant

**_smoll bean snek_ **

[9:41] lol

**_takashi s._ **

[9:41] _?!?!??!?_

Slightly less concerned, Shiro messaged Adam with a screenshot of the messages from James.

**_takashi s._ **

[9:42] honey are things okay at home?

[9:43] (image)

**_my sunshine_ **

[9:45] yep yep all good <3

[9:45] keith’s doing pretty well don’t worry

[9:45] also lol tgfj

**_takashi s._ **

[9:46] ...tgfj?

**_my sunshine_ **

[9:46] Thank God For James

 ***** ***** *****

Later that afternoon, Shiro pulled into the parking space in front of his apartment complex and went up to the second floor on tiptoe, pressing his ear to the door of their flat before getting the keys from his bag. He didn’t _hear_ anything alarming, but with Keith you never really knew. At that instant a shriek from Adam echoed into the hallway, and Shiro kicked the front door open with a cry before stumbling over the threshold to find—

“...What on earth are you guys doing?”

Somewhere in the flat Adam’s bluetooth speakers were blaring upbeat Hindi music, and Adam himself was standing in the living room with a pair of red batons in his hands. Keith was holding two green ones, with one raised a foot above his head as he prepared to strike.

“No!” yelped Shiro, rushing to stand between them. “I know you’re upset, Keith, but violence isn’t the answer!”

“To be fair, it usually is with the kind of trouble he gets into at school,” Adam mused. “That Griffin kid was asking for it.”

Keith dropped the sticks and burst into laughter.

“I wasn’t hitting him, Shiro,” he said, in the most patronizing tone Shiro had ever heard from him. “It’s only _dandiya._ We’re dancing.”

“But the neighbor said—”

“He did get me in the shoulder once by accident,” explained Adam. “But it was only because I was going too fast and turned early. You’re supposed to hit your partner’s sticks with yours, remember?”

Shiro did remember, vaguely. He dropped his satchel and sank onto the couch, sighing in relief as Keith rolled around giggling on the floor.

“I spent the whole day thinking you two were murdering each other,” he said severely, glaring at Keith and then Adam in turn before kissing his boyfriend’s cheek.

“Not yet, love,” Adam grinned. “But we’re going out tonight, so you might want to murder _us_ later.”

“Where?” inquired Shiro, surprised. They didn’t go out all that often, and when they did it was usually for an occasion like an anniversary or someone’s birthday.

“Adam’s temple,” announced Keith. “It’s—what was it?”

“Dussehra.”

“Right, that. Anyway, there’s going to be dancing with _sticks_ , and food, so Adam’s going to take me.”

“Will you come with us, moonlight?” asked Adam, settling his head against Shiro’s chest. “You don’t have to, but—”

Shiro’s heart swelled.

“Of course I do,” he said thickly, putting his arms around Adam’s waist and hugging him. “Of course. What should I wear, sweetheart?”

“I knew I ought to have asked for your measurements the last time my sister went home,” groaned Adam. “We’ll just have to make do, I guess. Your shoulders are a bit broad for my sherwanis, but they shouldn’t be too tight for you.”

The sherwani _was_ tight for him, but that night he was able to wear it without too much trouble. Adam picked a matching one embroidered in red and gold, while Keith had one of Adam’s old tunics with close-fitting jeans underneath—and was so excited to wear it that he nearly shot out of the house and into the car before Adam tugged him back.

“Jewelry first,” he said, going to the closet. Keith’s eyes grew even bigger when Adam pulled out three gold chains with filigree pendants, which he clasped round Shiro’s neck and Keith’s before Shiro helped him with his. After that he deemed them all ready to go, and led them outside to take pictures before they left for the festival.

It’s been five years, and Shiro still can’t forget how Adam looked that night—how the flickering lamps had set off the stitching in his clothes, how his eyes behind their spectacles had glistened like pools of amber—how the light in his face when he danced had pulled Shiro closer than ever, across the room and into his path like a meteor courting the sun. He can’t forget the drag of frayed carpet beneath his own bare feet, or Adam’s laughter when the ribbons on his _dandiya_ unraveled...or Keith’s delight when someone gave him a plate of watermelon before telling him to go to the kitchen and eat whatever he liked.

He thinks he might die if he doesn’t get to have that again someday.

But then there’s a _shift_ of some kind, and Shiro sits straight up in bed before choking a sob of joy. He knows, he doesn’t know how, but he _knows—_

—and he pulls his blanket round his shoulders and cries as he runs to the hangars, because he knows as he knows his own name and heart that Adam is awake and waiting.

 ***** ***** *****

_Five for his fingers and five for his toes,_

_The hues of the rainbow are seven — _

_But all of his beauty is fresh in his eyes,_

_And there on his shoulders, Heaven!_ ****

  
  
  
  
  
  
  



	7. Chapter 7

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Shiro and Adam reunite in the calm before the storm.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> You guys, I am so woefully un-caught up on comments that it's not funny. I am so grateful for your support, and I will get back to you all soon!! <3 <3  
> Now, without further ado...chapter 7.  
> UPDATE: I'm all caught up on replies! Thank you all so much ヽ(o＾▽＾o)ノ

**_[ARCHES F-18 TRAVERSAL: SIMULATION PASSED AT 0917]_ **

“Well done, Shiro,” mutters Iverson. Shiro sits back and stares at the screen, feeling something of the old thrill from his childhood after an achievement that wasn’t directly necessary for his survival—but what amazes him more is the quality of the simulation, which Colleen sat down and coded only the previous afternoon. 

“It’s incredible,” he breathes. “All this data...it’s completely accurate?”

“We have the sensors going all the time, so there’s a near-perfect simulation for every system we passed through on the Atlas,” Colleen says, looking up from a procedure she’s editing for Messier-33. “The spatial maps are finished first, and then we factor in gravitational forces and radiation for the most basic sims. This one is a lot more complicated, but it’s the same principle. I just layer effects until I’ve cleared the interference.”

“ _ You’re _ incredible,” observes Lance. Pidge and Hunk nod in fervent agreement, clearly itching to try out the simulator for themselves. “I can’t believe you did all of this in  _ two weeks.  _ Could we try one of the routes after Shiro, Mrs. Holt?”

“I don’t see why not,” she smiles. “Shiro, go on and get out of here. Adam’s waiting for you.”

She knows this because Adam and the Atlas have grown even closer of late, and it’s obvious to everyone at the institution when Adam is awake; whenever the interpreter by his vault turns on it sends a notification to the control room and central headquarters at the Garrison, and then another when he fades out of awareness. 

He’s been doing that far too much, Shiro thinks. Last night when he tore himself from his bed and ran barefoot to the hangars he found Adam alert and waiting, and they had fifteen whole minutes to themselves before the indicator blinked off. But after the joy and sorrow of their reunion, the croaking tears on Shiro’s side and Adam’s desperate assurances—amid all that Adam had managed to convey that something was  _ off  _ in the Atlas, something that was sapping more quintessence from his heart than the six-month flight to Triangulum did. 

“Please, sunshine, let me get you out of here,” Shiro had begged when he heard. “We’ll search for a crystal, and you can—”

_ You know I can’t, Takashi _ , said Adam, and for a moment Shiro could feel the warmth of a phantom kiss on his cheek.  _ I don’t know what it is. Sam and Colleen have been running themselves ragged, and they still can’t figure out what’s behind those thermal aberrations in the structure. It’s giving me such a headache—but whatever’s going on is for the best, sweetheart, and the Atlas needs me to see it through. I’ll be okay.  _

“Do you promise?” he whispered, pulling the cold brown hands to his heart. 

_ I promise, moonlight. I promise I’ll be fine. _

_ * _ __ _ * _ __ _ * _

When Shiro arrives in the cruiser’s containment hold, he finds Adam awake and playing tic-tac-toe with Keith. 

“How did being merged with a semi-sentient battleship make you  _ worse  _ at this?” Keith rages, glaring at Adam’s still body in the vault as he completes yet another row of three. “Shouldn’t it have given you perfect AI or something? You’re an engineer!”

_ I was always terrible at games,  _ says the console.  _ And I haven’t really had anyone to play with these last three years, unless you count Iverson. But you used to hate them, didn’t you? Takashi couldn’t even get you to play Monopoly when you were little. _

Keith’s cheeks flush crimson as the camera turns to get a better shot of his face. Shiro looks at the lens in surprise; he hadn’t known Adam could do that.

_ Good morning, sweetheart.  _ He can almost hear a smile in the pixelated letters as he drops a kiss on the viewing panel.  _ How are you feeling, Kashi? Ready for the operation? _

“You told him about my new arm?” asks Shiro, addressing Keith. He’s due to go to the medbay later that afternoon for surgery; the socket has to be implanted into the stump of his shoulder, since the Garrison model isn’t detachable like his old prosthetic. “ _ I  _ was going to tell him.”

_ No you weren’t,  _ counters the screen.  _ You thought I’d be worried sick if I knew about it, so you were going to tell me after everything was over.  _

“Wha—”

_ I know you better than you think, moonlight. Don’t deny it. _

“You don’t seem very angry at him,” Keith observes. “Though I’m not really sure why I think so, since we’re literally just looking at a tablet when we talk to you.”

_ Takashi went to war, died, and somehow came back again _ , replies Adam.  _ I spent five months training the MFEs and then became the battery of a magic spaceship. That tends to put things in better perspective, I think.  _

There’s a pause, and then he goes on. 

_ And anyway, I had to hear about you being part-Galra from  _ Sam.  _ When were  _ you _ going to bring that up, Keith?  _ Adam adds so many question marks that Keith makes a nervous sort of sound and runs straight out of the room, muttering something about pointless ventures and father figures who just won’t give him a break. 

Shiro bursts into laughter. 

“A break from what?” he chortles, sitting in Keith’s empty chair. “Explanations about his life? That’s never going to happen, and he knows it.”

_ That boy  _ was  _ my life for seven years,  _ says Adam drily.  _ He ought to know better by now. And I’m hearing the whole explanation behind that at some point, so he’d better get used to it. _

“He doesn’t really mind talking about being Galra, now that I think about it,” frowns Shiro. “What were you talking about before I got here? Something else might have been bothering him.”

_ If “something else” is a boy with pretty blue eyes, maybe. He’s pining and he doesn’t even know it. I think Keith came down for advice on how to confess to him—I kept losing our games on purpose to stop him from stalling, but he still never got to the point. _

“If I know him at all, he never will. You’ll have better luck with Lance.”

_ I can’t shame Lance into common sense by whipping out pictures of him trying to make snow-angels in a ballpit, love. Did you get any blackmail on him while you were out in space? _

“Well, I really shouldn’t…”

But he does, and for the next hour the room is filled with chuckles and a flurry of delighted beeping from Adam’s oxygen meter. 

* * *

“So are Shiro and Professor Walia back together, or…”

“Isn’t  _ that  _ the question of the year,” mutters Pidge, briefly glancing up from her laptop. “He spent almost the whole afternoon down there, so I’m guessing they are. But Keith says they haven’t really discussed anything, so who even knows for sure?”

She, Lance, and Hunk are sitting together in her bedroom, where all three of them are sleeping; the forced separation of their journey to Earth did much more harm than good, so the Garrison trio have been clinging to each other almost since the moment they landed. Hunk and Lance go around joined at the hip just like they used to at school, and whenever Pidge isn’t at her mother’s side she’s usually busy with them. It feels like they’re almost whole again, she thinks—back on a technologically undeveloped planet with all the people they love, and nothing much to worry about but their former black paladin’s love life. 

“Do we all know what they had to discuss?” asks Lance, looking warily at the others. “Pidge, you knew both of them before Kerberos, but Hunk—”

“I read Shiro’s diary back on the Castle,” he shrugs. “I probably know more than you two, so you don’t have to worry about spilling any secrets to me.”

“ _ Hunk! _ ”

“Hunk has no boundaries, Lance. We’ve established this.”

“It wasn’t like that,” Hunk protests, poking both of them softly in the shoulder. “After that fight with Zarkon when he disappeared—”

“Oh, buddy,” sighs Lance, dropping off the empty bunk over Pidge’s head and into Hunk’s lap. “We should have known. I’m sorry.”

Hunk absently pats his hair. “It’s true that I have no boundaries with you guys, though. If  _ you  _ had a diary, I definitely would have read it.”

“Do any of us really have any boundaries at this point? We’ve lived in each others’ pockets for months.”

“No, and we shouldn’t,” Lance proclaims. “So Hunk? Spill.”

“You probably know already, since Shiro talked to you and Keith,” Hunk points out. “Speaking of which, what  _ were _ you doing on the roof in the middle of the night with Keith? Don’t think I didn’t see you creeping back in at one in the morning with his jacket on.”

“Yeah, let’s talk about that,” Pidge chimes in. “Shiro’s like our collective dad, and he and Adam are practically married anyway. I want to hear about Keith now.”

Lance’s protests are smothered by a storm of raucous laughter, and for the first time in months they dare to believe everything might just turn out all right. 

* * *

Shiro remembers dreaming during his operation. 

He remembers watching his clone fighting Keith, shouting at Lance and arguing with Allura—remembers him frantic at the change in his mind and heart, desperately trying to figure out what was wrong with him. 

But then he remembers the peaceful hush of a dark-green strawberry field, and his heartbeat slows as he thinks of Adam’s silver-framed glasses catching the afternoon sun. 

* * *

“Hey, sweetheart.”

The voice is low and tender at once, paired with the softness of Adam’s hands against his cheek and shoulder. He’d know them anywhere, he thinks...thirty-two months of separation and he still hasn’t forgotten the lilt of the songs Adam used to hum in the kitchen, much less the touch of his fingers over his heart. But neither has he forgotten where he is, or where he must be—most likely resting in recovery, while Adam sleeps on like the dead somewhere inside the Atlas. 

“Well, you aren’t wrong,” laughs Adam, bending to kiss his forehead. “You are in recovery, and I’m still sleeping. But it really is me, Takashi.”

“How, sunshine?” Shiro murmurs, wriggling out of the blankets until he can put his head in Adam’s lap. There’s nothing except the unfamiliar room to hint that this isn’t real, so he intends to take as much as he can before he is forced away. “And where are we?”

“Shindola,” comes the answer, followed by another kiss at his temple and a third on the tip of his nose. “It’s where I grew up.”

He’s far too drowsy to get out of bed, for a while, The sheets are fresh and soft like a summer meadow beneath him, and Adam’s arms are warm and familiar like tea on a crisp afternoon. He smells of it too, Shiro realizes; before Kerberos the scents of toast and black chai were part and parcel of his skin, and now as he lies bundled up against Adam’s chest he decides no fragrance could ever surpass them. 

“Get up, darling,” whispers Adam, hugging him round the shoulders as he tries to tug him upright. “Come on. Let’s go out to the porch.”

The vision holds when Shiro tries to stand up, and as he follows Adam through the house he recognizes its details from the photos they had in their old flat—the muslin curtains hanging in the doorways, the little altar with its incense by the window in the front room—even the white and crimson rugs sprawled across the floor, keeping their feet from the cold of the tiles as they make their way to the deck. Outside, a weathered veranda curls around the front of the cottage, greyed by forty years’ worth of rain and children’s shoes drumming across the planks. There is no beauty in it, not anymore—but still there is a cushioned swing wide enough for both of them, and they push themselves back and forth with their feet as they look out over the fields. 

It’s always been like this with Adam, he thinks. There’s little need for speech when they’re together, probably because they’ve been together for so long; they hadn’t even hit their growth spurts when they had their first kiss at the Garrison, and Adam hadn’t yet finished his when they graduated and moved into the apartment. 

Those first few years were perfect, and Shiro blames himself completely for how they left things at the end. But the pilot who started on the Kerberos mission was terribly angry at everything: at Iverson and Sanda for trying to hold him back, at his body for condemning him to a slow and lingering death, at fate itself for giving him the love for piloting that made illness so difficult to bear. Even at Adam, who had everything that Shiro wanted and still chose to to throw it away. 

Adam, who called their engagement off and and still couldn’t let go of his ring, who slept beside Shiro even after the breakup and held him close every night, who packed him one last lunch to eat aboard the  _ Theia-Selene _ —he had been angry at Adam _. _

_ I’m yours,  _ Adam had said, a few days before the evening Shiro proposed.  _ To have and to hold. To take or discard. Takashi, I’ve always been yours.  _ Amid Keith’s exaggerated groaning Shiro was horrified to discover that Adam thought so little of himself, but two years and some change later he understands better what he meant. 

_ I am wedded to you. I  _ love  _ you. You will have my whole heart and soul for as long as I am living, and after you are gone from me there will be no others. It will be you, always, no matter what you feel for me in return.  _

Once, when they were thinking about possible options for their wedding vows (with Keith as a reluctant sounding-board through the process), Adam had looked at the traditional “till death do us part” and laughed. 

“What’s so funny about that, sunshine?”

“I’m a Hindu, love. You know I’m not going to promise you anything less than eternity.”

There are some wrongs that can be forgiven, Shiro thinks. If breaking Adam Ahluwalia’s heart is one of them, it ought not to be. 

“Moonlight?” asks Adam, shaking him gently by the shoulder. “Don’t be so sad, darling. What’s wrong?”

“Would you listen, sweetheart? If I told you I was sorry?”

“Of course not.” Inexplicably, Adam is smiling—smiling like the sun in the middle of June, as if Shiro’s never hurt him in his life. “Didn’t we do what we had to in the end, both of us? How can you even think of apologizing for that?”

“Not—not for Kerberos, sunshine. For before.”

For a while there’s only silence, and then Adam sighs and hugs him. “Do you know what Rukmini told me, three weeks before she died?”

“Adam,  _ honey _ —oh God, I’m so sorry—”

“Hush. Let me talk,” says Adam, laying a finger across his lips. “She said I needed to put my faith in a greater power, sometimes. Then it started raining at the camp, and she and Mallika and Padmini couldn’t get out of the city that night because the streets were flooded. That was how they found the missing students, all twenty of them, just because the terrorists eased up their guard during a storm. And then they went in twelve days later to break the children out. 

“Their backup arrived in time for the kids, you know. They all got out alive. But Mallika and Padmini died there, and Rukmini went after the guerilla brought her to a hospital.”

He blinks away his tears, and looks across the fields to the river as if in search of comfort. 

“A thunderstorm, Takashi. That’s all it took to tear my sisters from me, and all it took to make sure the children were saved. You wouldn’t even have  _ wanted  _ that mission if you weren’t ill, if you didn’t think I was throwing away my life for you, if you weren’t angry about it—and then the Galra would have come, and we would have been enslaved or dead, or worse. None of it was insignificant, moonlight. You know that.”

And finally, after enduring war and death and parting from all he’s ever loved, Shiro realizes that he does know. He doesn’t think he’s ever felt freer now that Adam has said so, and when he nestles back against Adam’s side his lips are trembling with relief. Not relief that he’s been forgiven, not quite—but relief that it was always meant to be this way somehow, though he can’t yet fathom why. 

“I don’t have much longer, sweetheart,” says Adam, taking his hands and looking earnestly into his face. “They’re going to wake you soon. But you do understand, don’t you?”

“I do, sunshine. I promise.”

“You’ll look after Keith for me?”

“He does more looking after himself these days,” Shiro sighs, thinking of the brother who so desperately dragged him back to life time and time again. “But I always will. Always.”

It is then that the farm begins to fade, crumbling away before him like the dream it’s been all along. Adam goes with it, slipping away and into the fog with one last kiss on his mouth—but despite this the warmth of Adam’s hands is as steady and strong as ever, and as Shiro returns to the world of the living he knows that his darling is still beside him.

_ I’m yours, Takashi. You know it, don’t you? I’ll be yours for as long as I live, and after. _

  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  



	8. Chapter 8

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which the storm begins.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you all so much for your kind kudos and comments. I love you all so much (´｡• ω •｡`) ♡ I'm not caught up on replies yet, but I should be by the time I post chapter 9!!!  
> Now, without further ado...angst.

When Adam becomes aware again, he senses that something is wrong. It’s not just that he was at his childhood home with Takashi only five minutes ago, or that try as he might his indicator won’t turn on: something is wrong with the Atlas, and he feels it deep in his physical body where he hasn’t felt anything for years. He reaches out for the ship in fright, clutching in the darkness at the only friend he’s known for the past two years—and finds it shuddering in agony, enduring its pain without making a sound as Adam stands by, helpless.

“What’s wrong with you?” he cries. “Oh, God—take what you need from me if it helps, take it—”

_ Nothing wrong,  _ groans the Atlas.  _ Only faster. The change is nearly finished, Pilot, but we cannot wait for it to run its course. Something is coming here, and we are not ready. Atlas tries to hurry, but it pains. _

“Take what you need from me, now,” says Adam, feeling as if he might cry. “You can’t do this alone. What’s coming here? We—we have to warn the others, but I’m still unconscious—how close is it?”

_ Sensors will see to it _ , the Atlas assures him.  _ They have grown powerful, with Pilot’s help. And it will drain you too much, Adam—Atlas does not know what we are becoming, but your body will not endure without you if it is weakened further.  _

“Would it do any good?” he asks. “If I helped you?”

The Atlas ponders for a while. The ship seems to know the answer to his question almost immediately, but for some reason it only turns away and tells him to keep quiet until the worst is over. 

If Adam were still attached to his body, this last would have brought him to tears. 

“You’re hurting, and Takashi and the rest are in danger from something we can’t even detect yet _—_ you _have_ to talk to me _._ Please, _piya_ , you can’t do this! I’ve had nothing and nobody but you since they put me in here, you can’t—”

_ Hush, pilot,  _ the Atlas sighs.  _ Atlas cannot hear you crying. There is enough hurt already.  _

“I can help, and you know it,” says Adam furiously. “Don’t you  _ dare  _ do this to me. It doesn’t matter what happens to me—I don’t care if it kills me! But this is what I’m here for, and it’s  _ your  _ job to use whatever it takes to protect us.”

_ Atlas loves the Pilot. Will not do you harm.  _

Adam chokes and cries out in despair, because it’s Takashi all over again: first Takashi and now the Atlas, preventing him from giving aid where it is needed, from doing his duty and carrying the burdens Adam was meant to bear. He cannot stand much more of this, he thinks, this betrayal that wounds him far deeper than cruelty, than unfaithfulness. At twenty-three he would rather have watched Takashi leave him for another man than set one foot off the planet with his body crumbling to pieces, and now at twenty-six he would much rather give his last to a misguided battlecruiser than leave the world in jeopardy. Adam is no lesser than either of them, good and great though they are. Takashi is only a man after all, though a heartbreakingly strong and brave one—and the Atlas owes its existence to the love still thriving within him, its voice and the very thread of its being to his desperate desire to guard the lives in his care. 

And he has guarded them desperately, with all the strength in his heart: Sam who used to worry for his happiness like a father, Colleen who tried to look after him even after Katie disappeared, Iverson who broke down and wept when the  _ Theia-Selene  _ was lost and begged for Adam’s forgiveness, the MFE pilots who laughed and called him  _ captain  _ when he was assigned to train them, the tiny cadets who ran to his office in tears when they were homesick—

—because he stands in the face of destruction for  _ them _ , like Rumi and Padma and Mallika on that terrible night in the camps, and as their brother he will not run from death in the name of sacrifice.

“I am your equal,” he bellows, grasping at the Atlas’s consciousness and dragging it back to face him. “I came to give my quintessence freely, of my own will. Everyone I loved was trying to stop me from doing it—there were  _ hundreds  _ of people who could have replaced me in this bloody tomb if I wanted. Fear didn’t drive me here, or grief over losing Takashi. I came because it was my duty to keep my friends alive, and whether you like it or not that’s just what I’m going to do! Now get over yourself, for Heaven’s sake, and let me give you what you need!”

_ Pilot, you had that on your chest for longer than Atlas realized _ , says the ship, astonished.  _ Atlas did not know you had such anger in you. _

“Is that really all you’re getting from this?” Adam mutters. “Do you want me to shout again? Because believe me, I will.”

_ Of that Atlas has no doubt, Pilot. And yes, Pilot was right. You can help us greatly, but it will be difficult.  _

“I fell in love with Takashi Shirogane and helped raise a child and two eagles with him. I know all about difficult.”

The ship laughs in delight.  _ Eagles? Really? _

“It’s a long story,” grumbles Adam. “Keith gave me more headaches than the birds did, though. If I get out of this alive, I’ll tell you, and you can make fun of me as much as you like. Now tell me what I have to do.”

_ Pilot must go back into your body _ , says the Atlas regretfully.  _ Atlas must take more quintessence, and without you your body will not survive the toll of it. But you will not be able to move, or see, or hear. There will be only pain, and worse than Atlas is suffering—such strain on your heart will hurt you, but Atlas will not let it kill you. This Atlas swears.  _

“Will I be able to talk?” 

_ As Pilot has been doing. True speech, no. _

“Then that’s good enough for me,” he sighs. “Wait, is that it? Why did you let me rant so much, then?”

_ Pilot needs to shout a little for his health, Atlas thinks.  _ And _ have a proper talk with Takashi after everything is over. Now, shall we begin? _

“You mean you goaded me on _ purpose _ ?”

Silence.

“…I really can’t believe you sometimes.”

* * *

Once again, Shiro is a prisoner—but in what might be the best kind of way, this time. 

After all the to-do with his arm and the jewel in Allura’s crown, the doctors banished him to a hospital room with strict orders not to move. Of course he tried to argue, but Coran and Keith wouldn’t stand for it; this had led to his confinement in the empty recovery ward with Keith standing guard beside him, and all the rest of the paladins camping out on the floor. 

Lance, Pidge, and Hunk have their three sleeping bags together in front of the window, while Allura naps gracefully in a chair by his bed. His flesh hand rests on the sheets, still clasped in hers, and on the other side Keith is glaring at everyone who passes. Shiro resists the urge to tell him to go to sleep; Hunk and Lance have been taking turns saying it for hours, and Keith only turned up his nose at them. 

“How are you feeling?” he asks, staring skeptically at Shiro’s arm. “That looks so off, Shiro. I’m not even going to lie.”

“I think it’s beautiful,” says Shiro stubbornly, because it is—painted a sleek silver-white with grey sockets at the bottom of the knuckles, and a ring of black around the root of the thumb. Most precious of all is the piece of Balmeran crystal that once glittered in Allura’s circlet, and not for the first time he looks at her and wonders what he’s ever done to deserve her as a friend. He cried after he woke up and heard what had happened, and he doesn’t think he’ll stop for a good few days.

He looks back at his arm and smiles. It  _ is  _ pretty, glowing a gentle blue from the gem in the battery port, and Shiro thinks he might get something to remind him of each of the paladins. Colored bracelets, maybe, though the gap between his shoulder and elbow might complicate things a little...and a gold wedding ring would suit the third finger magnificently, he decides. 

“Did anyone tell Adam that the surgery’s over?” Shiro asks, suddenly concerned. “It’s been hours, he’ll worry—”

“No one’s been able to,” says Keith, cutting him off. “He blanked out before you went under, and his console hasn’t made a sound since.” 

“There’s something wrong,” Shiro whispers, feeling his heart drop in his chest. “I know there is, what—”

“No?” Keith lifts an eyebrow at him. “Why would there be? Adam’s been out for longer before, according to Pidge’s dad. He’s probably just tired since he was awake for so long today.”

But for some reason Shiro can’t shake off the feeling that Adam is in trouble, so he gently frees his fingers from Allura’s and swings his legs down to the floor. He doesn’t get far, though; Keith is on him in an instant, shoving him back into bed before sitting firmly on his feet. 

“You’re not going anywhere,” he scolds, poking Shiro’s cheek. “He told me to make sure you  _ rested _ , Shiro, and I’m not going to let him down.” There’s more in his voice than a resolve to keep his word, and Shiro stops trying to get up. 

“He told you that?” 

“He told me a lot of things,” Keith mutters. “If I’d listened back then, maybe he wouldn’t be in this mess in the first place.”

“What do you mean?” asks Shiro. A moment later he remembers that Keith ought to have been with Adam the night he first returned to Earth, but from the lived-in look of his father’s old shack—

“Did—did you run away from him?”

“Not exactly,” says Keith miserably. “After your ship was first reported missing, Iverson was petitioning everyone he could think of to move up the mission to Charon that was scheduled to leave after you got back. It was supposed to pass Kerberos on the way, and since they knew for sure that the  _ Theia-Selene  _ landed safely he thought you might be rescued if you were still alive somehow. I’d already been withdrawn by then, but—”

“Wait, wait,” Shiro interrupts, holding up a hand. “Withdrawn?”

“I wasn’t expelled,” his brother confesses. “One of the communications officers made a comment about the crash being all your fault, and I broke his jaw. Adam tried to change Iverson’s mind about me being thrown out, but I already had a record for fighting, and according to the contract of conduct that should’ve been the last straw. So Adam pulled me out before they could do anything, to stop the Garrison from blacklisting me in case I ever wanted to finish my certification later.”

“But what does that have to do with the Charon mission?” asks Shiro, his mind racing. Sanda and the rest of the higher-ups had been in the middle of organizing it while he was training for Kerberos, drawing up a shortlist of pilots and field researchers who were skilled enough to go—

“I’m getting there,” huffs Keith. “A few weeks after I left, all the potential pilots for Charon dropped out of the program except for a couple of students in their last year. So Iverson asked Adam to go.”

“What...what did he say?”

“I didn’t stay to hear, actually. The moment I found out he’d been offered the spot I ran back to my dad’s old place, because I was sure he wouldn’t go risking his life to find you if I still needed him here. I thought if he could be certain I’d be okay, if I could live out there by myself for a while…”

“You thought he’d come for me,” Shiro whispers, giving him a small sad smile. “And then?”  After all these years, he can’t tell for certain whether Adam would have gone. 

He isn’t sure what he wants the answer to be, either. But he can guess what it must have been.

“And then nothing,” sighs the younger boy. “The satellite got pictures of the ship about two days later, and it was completely destroyed. It was pretty clear that no one onboard could have made it, so the Charon mission was canceled. Adam came out to find me and took me back home, but I told him I needed some time before I could think about school again. And then a little while after I turned eighteen I felt the blue lion’s energy, and we started searching the caves together. 

“I was mostly living in the cabin by then, but I still went back on the hoverbike to see him every few days. He was okay with me hanging out there alone, but he wanted to make sure I was eating properly, so…”

He sniffs, and Shiro’s heart begins to ache when he sees that Keith’s eyes are wet.  

“I was going to go back to the flat the day after we found Blue,” he murmurs, drawing his sleeve across his face. “Didn’t even get to say goodbye.”

And when Keith puts down his head and cries Shiro holds him close, suddenly horribly certain that the worst is still to come. 

* * *

_ “His heartbeat’s been constant for years, what the—” _

_ “Get a dose of lidocaine from the medbay,  _ go! _ Much more of this and it’ll drive him to a heart attack—if his pulse goes over two hundred, we’re taking him out of there.” _

_ “We can’t, sir. The panel won’t open.” _

_ “Use the override sequence, then!” _

_ “The Lieutenant General’s conscious, Admiral. He won’t let us do it.” _

_ “The man might have been a brilliant pilot, but—Walia, you idiot! Let us in, or you’ll be dead by sunrise—we can’t even get a defibrillator working if you don’t open the panel, Walia,  _ please— _ ” _

_ “Power the Atlas down, Commander. Now.” _

  
  
  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Should I make a tumblr for this? Yea or nay? Let me know.


	9. Chapter 9

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which the Atlas completes its transformation.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Officially the last chapter with angst for a while, guys. Buckle up.
> 
> also I have a [tumblr](https://datboicomehere.tumblr.com/) now, hmu if you want :D

It’s been nearly eight years since the day he first slipped getting out of his F-97 and hit his head on the hangar floor, and Shiro still can’t remember much about his diagnosis and the two months that followed. 

There were hospital visits, around thirty of them—and always Adam by his bedside, sitting in a split-bottomed chair or curled up asleep at his feet. Between the rounds of treatment he remembers Adam bringing him rice balls and curry from home, and Keith’s worried phone calls from the guest bedroom at the Holts’, where Matt had demanded he stay once he heard that Shiro was ill. He remembers the daze of draws and tests and two twin scars at his elbows from the catheters implanted there, which kept him from lying on his side for weeks on end—but beyond that his days in the hospital are a blur, due to his medication, or (more likely) to the state of shock he was in until the Garrison cleared him for missions again four months later. 

The one afternoon he recalls with perfect clarity fell on a Saturday, three days after he left the recovery center. Keith was back from Matt’s house, and keeping almost entirely to his bedroom as if frightened to make a sound; Shiro was still on leave from work, spending most of his time in a blanket fort while Adam flew in and out with food and medicine. 

A little while after lunch Keith came out of his den to ask for help with with his homework, and the blessed normalcy of it soothed Shiro so much that he fell asleep the moment his brother had gone; he had been unable to rest since the day he fell and woke up later in an ambulance, and if Adam hadn’t stayed in the hospital with him he would probably have gotten addicted to tranquilizers. He must have dreamt after Keith left, he supposes, of his days as a student at the Garrison and all he grew to love there—but Shiro didn’t remember exactly, and two hours later he awoke to the warmth of Adam’s arms and a half-familiar lullaby. 

He sang as easily as he breathed, Shiro thought. Even when they were cadets he used to hum to himself in the simulators, and Shiro always found comfort in his voice: a voice so fresh and smooth and light that it could have belonged to a child, if not for its deepness. Presently he was singing under his breath so as not to shake Shiro from sleep, and running his long brown fingers through the tuft of hair on Shiro’s forehead. As the words fell one by one from his lips Shiro smiled and turned over, pressing his face to the front of Adam’s shirt in a silent demand for a kiss. 

Adam had laughed and kissed him with a smile, once on his cheek and once on the side of his nose “for good luck, and again for good measure,” as he liked to say in the first year they were dating. 

“What were you singing, sweetheart?” Shiro mumbled, yawning from ear to ear. “Sounded pretty.”

“Just something from one of my dad’s old movies. I’m sorry I woke you, moonlight. Go back to sleep.”

“Not sleepy anymore.” Shiro yawned again. “Keep singing, sunshine? It’s nice.”

“Are you sure? You didn’t get enough rest at the hospital, and—”

“Please?”

“Okay, okay,” Adam chuckled. He took in a breath and began where he had stopped, singing so quietly that Shiro rather suspected he was trying to lull him into drifting off again. 

“ _ Tumhi mere mandir, tumhi mere puja…  _

_ Tumhi devataa ho, tumhi devataa ho. _

_ Koyi meri aankho se dekhe to samjhe, _

_ Ke tum mere kya ho, ke tum mere kya ho.” _

Here he fell silent for a second time, and Shiro pushed insistently at his shoulders until Adam bent down to look at him. 

“What does it mean, love?”

“ _ Tumhi mere mandir _ ...you’re my mandir. You know what a mandir is, right? You’ve been to mine.” 

“You’re calling me a temple, sunshine?” Shiro grinned and sat up against a heap of pillows. “Really?”

“Not really a temple, exactly,” mused his boyfriend. “Well, that’s what it is, but I was actually calling you a—well, a place of sanctity, I suppose. My place of comfort in times of sorrow, and celebration in times of happiness, if that makes sense.”

“And the rest?”

“ _ Tumhi mere puja _ means that you’re my worship—the best of me, my  _ puja _ ,” smiled Adam. “Like the ones I do for Holi and Navratri, remember? And the third bit,  _ tumhi devataa ho— _ ”

“I know that one!” Shiro interrupted, wrapping his arms around Adam’s waist. “It’s—wait, did you just call me your God?” At that Adam’s face went red like an early sunset, dazing Shiro so completely with its beauty that he nearly missed the answer.

“Not  _ literally,  _ Takashi!”

“How else was I supposed to read that, then?” He was laughing at the top of his voice, probably frightening Keith half to death in the room next to theirs—but he cared nothing for that, because Adam was bright-eyed and blushing beside him and so clearly happy to be there that the pain of his newfound illness began to wither in comparison. 

“It means you’re divinity, sweetheart,” murmured Adam, taking Shiro’s hands in his. “The one in whose hands I place my fate, and for whose joy I endure. When I think of you I remember all the goodness I’ve ever known, or been given, and in every thing of loveliness I see a piece of you—only you, Takashi. It’s  _ always  _ been you.”

There was nothing Shiro could say to that, no reply he could muster to match Adam’s devotion—no means of thanks or repayment he could think of for this boy of only nineteen with the wisdom of a man of ninety, who looked at him broken and kissed him and called him divine—so he only strained Adam closer, and motioned him to go on. 

* * *

The old song echoes round and round in his head as he lies in the medbay, and Shiro doesn’t know if he wants it to leave him alone or ring like a bell through his heart until the day he dies. 

All the other paladins are gone except for Lance and Pidge, who claim to be having some sort of “selfie contest” at the foot of Shiro’s bed. As far he can tell, this mostly consists of taking pictures with their datapads and editing them before sending them all to Hunk, who then decides which one of them made better faces. They’re only here to distract him, he knows, and he appreciates the effort—every now and then they pull such ridiculous expressions that he breaks out into laughter, though it never lasts for long. 

After all, he can’t very well forget the commotion of the night before. 

At about three o’clock the emergency staff had barreled past his door, startling Keith so badly that he fell off his chair and landed on Lance’s sleeping bag. Shiro barely glanced up at them as their shadows flew over his bed; he’s spent enough time in the Garrison hospital to know that it’s fairly normal for doctors to run around at odd hours. Military significance aside, the Garrison is first and foremost a  _ school _ —with close to two thousand students under the age of eighteen, accidents that warrant medical attention happen almost on the daily. Even Keith realized a split-second later that nothing was necessarily wrong, and went back to sleep where he’d fallen sprawled across Lance’s legs. 

This was before one of the younger privates came by ten minutes later to tell then that the Atlas was cordoned off to everyone but emergency personnel, because Adam was conscious and refusing treatment for a dangerously high pulse. Shiro hasn’t slept since the boy took himself off to carry the news elsewhere, and by mutual agreement the paladins (read: Keith) have agreed not to leave him alone until Adam is ready for visitors. 

“I think I’m going to go for a walk,” he announces, getting out of bed and reaching for his jacket. “Down to the commissary, for lunch.”

“Uh,” says Lance, dropping his datapad into Pidge’s lap in his hurry to stand up. “Shiro, you’re still in recovery. You literally just got out of the operating room yesterday— _ I’ll  _ go to the commissary, and bring back whatever you want.”

“I’ll be fine,” Shiro answers, distractedly searching for his shoes. The ache in his shoulder isn’t particularly bothersome, likely due to Allura’s crystal, and the white walls of his hospital room might drive him crazy if he doesn’t get out of here soon. 

Pidge throws the tablets onto his bed and stands up next to Lance. “If you don’t stay in bed, Keith will probably kill us. And then Matt would kill Keith, and you’d be down a brother. Then Adam would probably kill Matt when he gets out of the Atlas, and my parents would die of grief. And Hunk, because even though we’re best friends he’s incapable of seeking revenge in cold blood. ”

“Bold of you to assume Adam wouldn’t be first in the Keith-killing queue,” he mutters. He’s only seen Adam in a temper once before they fought about the Kerberos mission, and it involved Keith, his hoverbike, a broken curfew, and a fractured leg. Shiro shudders at the memory, and tries not to think what the consequences for running off into space without a packed lunch or a sweater would be. 

With that he puts his shoes on, waves goodbye to Lance and Pidge, and sets off down the corridor. A minute later Shiro realizes they aren’t trying to stop him, and an incredulous whisper from the door tells him why. 

“Did—did Shiro just say a  _ meme? _ ”

Huh. He should quote memes more often, he thinks. If only to make sure that things start going his way around here. 

* * *

The Atlas hadn’t lied about the pain, Adam decides. 

Being back in his body feels incredibly foreign after two years suspended between his brain and a battleship, and his pain tolerance is almost nonexistent. He can’t tell exactly  _ why  _ it hurts—from whatever he overheard in the night it seems his heart is working at a breakneck pace to supply the Atlas, but somehow the pain seems to be everywhere. During the worst of it he couldn’t muster the strength to do more than beg to be left alone, and when that failed he had the Atlas lock his containment chamber. He knows the medical staff was only trying to help, but the ship is trying to buy them  _ time _ —time to finish whatever is taking place inside it, and if his pulse slows down and thins the flow of quintessence—

He doesn’t know what would happen then. He tries not to think about it. 

Adam drifts in and out of awareness for hours, dreaming of his childhood in Shindola whenever he falls asleep; whenever he’s conscious he can tell that his room is full of emergency personnel, and that his vitals are concerning enough that someone is standing by with some kind of magic sword to cut him out if he keeps refusing to open the panel. Probably Keith, he decides, though Adam doesn’t know why he thinks so. A picture of Keith’s little purple dagger flashes before Adam’s eyes, and he smiles at the thought of the twelve-year-old he remembers taking on the world with a fancy knife and winning. But even that can’t distract him for long, and in a desperate attempt to take his mind off the pain he reaches out for the Atlas. 

It’s not much better than he is, though it’s definitely recovered a bit. In Adam’s opinion the ship sounds stronger than it was yesterday afternoon, but unlike him it has grown so tired that the pain just passes it by. 

“How are you feeling, buddy?” he whispers, trying to ignore the ache in his chest. “Any better today?”

_ A little _ , admits the Atlas.  _ Not long now, my Pilot. Not long now.  _

But the ship still doesn’t seem to know what they’re waiting for, and five minutes later Adam grows weary again and slips back into slumber. 

* * *

When he wakes, the Atlas is in agony. 

_ I am sorry _ , it cries, clutching at him the moment he realizes.  _ The foe is coming faster, and I am not finished yet. I am sorry, Adam—forgive me, there is no time— _

“No,” he says, and the strength in his voice surprises even him. “It’s going to be all right. I know I can give you more,  _ piya.  _ Take it.”

_ I can’t _ , weeps the Atlas.  _ I promised I’d keep you safe.  _

It has a voice like his now, he thinks—it calls itself  _ I _ , not Atlas, and he knows as he knows his love for Takashi that it must take what it needs. He’s dimly certain the Atlas won’t be able to protect him, if it does...but it doesn’t really matter, does it? Takashi and Keith are home and safe, and Rumi and the rest are waiting—

_ Never _ , the Atlas screams. It’s quiet now, furiously thinking, and Adam wonders if this venture could possibly have turned out any different for him. He thinks again of three sisters dead in a terrorist camp, and wonders if he even wanted it to. 

_ Don’t think like that _ , begs the Atlas, sounding strangely like Takashi.  _ Please, Pilot. I have a plan.  _

“Well, what is it?” Adam realizes that he’s probably more disinterested than he ought to be, but he can’t really bring himself to care. 

_ I cannot save you. But your friends, in the hold—they can.  _

“What?” Adam frowns. If the Atlas can’t do anything, how could the doctors possibly—

_ They have a device with them, do they not? To keep your heart beating? _

“You—you mean, what you’re going to do will—”

_ It might very well stop it, Adam. But it will finish the job. You must tell them now, so they know not to touch you until then.  _

Adam pokes at the circuitry and finds the path to his interpreter open, sending off the message before turning back to the Atlas. 

“There, I’m ready. Let’s go.”

What follows is undoubtedly the worst pain he’s felt in his life. The ship reaches into him, and an instant later his heart is beating so quickly that he can’t tell one pulse apart from the next; after that the viewing panel turns clear and slides open, and then the doctors lose no more time. 

They unbutton his shirt, determine that his chest is clear enough of hair—the nurses shaved what little there was before he went under, for some reason—and cut the loop of white thread he wears across his body, keeping it safe so it can be tied back later. Through all this he realizes he can’t breathe, and someone slams an oxygen mask across his face as if in response to his fear. That must have been Keith, he thinks, though Adam can’t imagine why the staff is letting him see this. He feebly orders the doctors to send him out, and receives only a bark of annoyance in reply; though he must be about twenty-two now Keith is as angry as ever, and the warmth of the knowledge carries him through as the pain is magnified further. 

Adam’s perception of time just slips away, after that. Hours might have passed since he last felt the Atlas, or days, and—

_ Forgive me, Pilot. Forgive me.  _

It feels as if a bonfire has come to life in his ribs, and if he had command of his body he would have screamed—but as it is he can only lie still as the Atlas begins to tremble, shaking from top to bottom as the doctors clutch at the walls to keep from falling. A moment later it wails in distress and breaks from him completely, and as his consciousness fades he feels a current firing across his heart. 

And then the pain in his chest is gone, and Adam feels nothing at all. 

Somewhere in the room, he hears Takashi crying.


	10. Chapter 10

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which the storm (almost) arrives.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you so much for your love and support, everyone! I'm sorry this chapter is late, but it's a (relatively) angst free one to make up for it. I'll be caught up on replies by chapter 11, so see you all then! ~<3  
> Now, without further ado: flowers, kisses, and irresponsible teenagers.

Two days after Adam lapses back into a coma, Shiro barricades himself in the Atlas’s simulator and refuses to open the doors even to Coran and Allura. He starts up the chamber and doesn’t falter for a second in the middle of crumbling asteroid fields, or lose control to radiation and gravity while passing by red giants; instead he maneuvers the ship from system to system and manages twenty-four hours’ worth of unassisted flight before Iverson shows up and bodily hauls him out. 

“You’ll kill yourself in there if you’re not careful,” the commander sighs, locking the simulator room before pushing Shiro towards the canteen. “It’s not going to make Adam better any faster, Shiro.” But Iverson himself has not rested since Juliana Castille from emergency shocked Adam’s heart back to life with a defibrillator and sheer force of will, and all the higher-ups at the Garrison know why. The IGF-Atlas is awake, sentient and communicating through Adam’s Morse interpreter, and according to Sam it claims to have been so since before the flares in Triangulum. 

“You’re  _ certain  _ it’s not Major Walia talking?” Sanda had said at the previous morning’s debriefing. “The Atlas—which is a  _ warship,  _ mind you—it’s aware?”

“Normally, I would agree with you,” frowned Sam. “But at the moment there’s not nearly enough activity going on in Adam’s brain for him to be the one communicating, and it does explain why he kept refusing treatment even when we told him he was verging on a heart attack. The Atlas must have told him not to let us interfere.”

“And Adam’s heart gave out the moment the Atlas started shaking,” Colleen had added. “I couldn’t locate the faults in the structure after that, or reproduce any of the thermal aberrations we picked up earlier. Adam was definitely in accord with the Atlas over whatever happened last night, Admiral, and we can rule out any possibility of the ship being an AI. It recognized me through the security camera and thanked me on his behalf.”

On his part, Shiro doesn’t care about the Atlas’s intelligence. From his own brief stint as black paladin—in his own body, since Black never really talked to his clone—he remembers his lion’s thoughts and feelings, but never any actual speech. It was like Lance had said when they first found Blue on Earth; the lions shared their ideas rather than communicating verbally. The fact that the Atlas can talk is startling, certainly, but in the long run it doesn’t really matter. It’s only a battlecruiser after all, and useless without quintessence from Adam’s heart. 

Shiro wonders if he’ll ever make his peace with Adam’s sacrifice, or forget the sight of him thrashing at the shock of a current through his body—

_ “Come back and take the lunchbox _ ,  _ Takashi—you’re a bigger idiot than you look like, if you think I’m going to let you eat at that diner that made you sick last time—and for Heaven’s sake take Keith to a decent shopping center while you’re out, he wears even more black than you do.” _

He won’t.

* * *

Graduation had felt like the world was theirs for the taking, Shiro remembers. 

They didn’t move out of the barracks until the following summer, because Adam had his student-teaching job, and both of them had post-certification training to finish. This mostly consisted of flying supply routes to offshore bases, and eight hours weekly in the combat simulators (the Garrison was still a division of the Air Force after all, and required all the cadets who stayed on after graduating to study advanced flight tactics and protocol). Shiro never liked the combat sims, but the supply routes were fun in a way—he and Adam had a strange little aircraft that was bigger than a fighter but smaller than a standard cargo plane, and together they’d fly up and down the coast with nothing but ocean beneath them. They usually made their trips ahead of schedule, and played hooky at various beaches before starting back; Shiro still has the shells and sand dollars he found in San Diego, assuming the things from their old apartment haven’t been thrown away. 

It was on their twenty-third supply mission that Shiro asked Adam to move in with him, somewhere between the sea and stars one clear dark night in Oregon. 

“Wha’ d’you mean?” Adam replied, talking through a mouthful of fish and chips. He threw away his takeout box and swallowed, muttering so prettily about the price of the food that Shiro bent forward and kissed him. “Takashi! I love you too, you dork—but you do know we already live together, right? We have since I started rooming with you and Matt at the start of fourth year, and since graduation it’s only been the two of us.”

“I know,” said Shiro, wringing his hands before leaning up and kissing Adam again. “But they’re still—well, they’re cadet dorms, you know? We don’t have a kitchen, or even our own bathroom, and we’d have to be  _ married  _ before we could apply for family housing at the Garrison.”

“So marry me.” Adam opened the second box of takeout and offered Shiro a fork before digging into a heap of strawberry crepes as if his life depended on it. “Then it won’t be a problem.”

Shiro somehow managed to gasp and splutter at the same time. “What—I— _ marry?  _ But I—but you—you’re not even eighteen yet, and, uh—”

“Breathe, Takashi. It’s okay if you don’t want to marry me, moonlight,” soothed his boyfriend. “I was only jok—”

“I do!” Shiro screeched, frightening a small red crab so much that it jumped straight into the water. “I’ve never even thought about marrying anyone but you!”

Adam froze and stared at him with strawberry jam on his nose. 

“You—you haven’t?”

“No! I know it’s only been three years since we met and two since we got together, but  _ Adam _ —I never thought of anyone at all before I met you, and the second I first ran into you in the corridor I was  _ gone.  _ Of course I’ve dreamed about marrying you someday, how could I  _ not _ —”

The minutes that followed—or maybe even hours, since Shiro wasn’t really counting—were like something out of a fairytale, with Adam’s smooth hair against his cheek and kisses traded in the moonlight. At some point he ended up pushing Adam close to the face of the cliff, which was when he caught his heel and stumbled and fell back into the sand. Adam came with him, tumbling down on a clump of seaweed that promptly stuck to his pants. 

“Ugh,” he observed, peeling it off with a shudder. “I hate seaweed, it’s so cold.”

They lay there together in silence for a while, hand-in-hand as they looked through the clouds at the moon—and then the stillness was broken with a word, one which set Shiro’s heart aflame like a spark on kindling in summertime. 

“Yes.”

“Yes, you’ll marry me? Or—”

“Yes to everything,” Adam told him. “And anything you might dream of later, once we’re off this beach. I might even sneak into the kitchens tomorrow to make you okonomiyaki if you ask.”

“You do that just for the thrill of it,” smiled Shiro. “I’m pretty sure Iverson knows, though.”

“Darn. Hey, do you think they’ll care at the base if we don’t go back till tomorrow?”

“Not if we let them know we don’t want to fly at night, I guess. We’re already ahead of schedule, so they won’t have slotted anyone to take the plane till Thursday.”

“Then get up, because we’re hitting the town,” his boyfriend announced. “I want to see all the shops at the pier, and I  _ know  _ you were eyeing that ice-cream parlor we passed on the way to dinner. We’re going to sightsee and window-shop until we can’t walk anymore, and then we’re going to stay at the bed and breakfast and sleep for twelve hours straight.”

“We won’t be able to eat the breakfast then, sunshine. We’d miss it.”

“We’ll wake up for breakfast and then go back to sleep again. Come on, Takashi, hurry  _ up _ —”

Needless to say, Shiro hurried up, and they finished their evening with a dip in the bay and kisses beneath the stars. 

* * *

_ Wake up, Pilot.  _

Adam blinks back into consciousness with a groan. He doesn’t know how long it’s been since he was last awake, but it feels like getting up after a long illness or a night spent making too many bad decisions at a bar. 

_ You’ve never been to a bar, Adam. Now get up. The foe is coming.  _

“Foe?” he croaks, scrambling to attention. “You said you could just tell it was coming, before. Can the sensors pick it up now? And are you any better?”

_ I am as I ought to have been from the beginning,  _ says the Atlas.  _ Complete, that is. But how do you fare, my Pilot? I put back enough quintessence to steady your heart, and now it is strong once again.  _

“I’m fine,” Adam answers. He’s out of his physical body again, he realizes—the feeling of being inside it for the first time in over two years was a highly unpleasant one, and he isn’t eager to have it repeated until he’s out of the hold. “Tired, but okay.”

_ Not at your best, then.  _

“Well, I mean,” he huffs. “I  _ did  _ just work my heart to the point of an infarction, so—”

_ I was not chiding you, Pilot,  _ soothes the ship, speaking as gently as a mother might.  _ I only meant to ask if you needed a little more.  _

“Quintessence?” asks Adam, more confused than ever. “But don’t you take it from me? How is that supposed to work, then?”

_ Now I have my own, but it is a different kind. It is not your heart-quintessence, that makes things thrive and grow and brings forth life out of nothing, like you gave life to me. Mine sees to things that are already there, and keeps them as they should be. It is how I made you well again.  _

“So my quintessence  _ created  _ you, and now yours is going to  _ maintain  _ me? I—I think I need to go back to sleep, buddy. My mind has been blown enough for one day. Unless you need me for something, I suppose.”

_ I do _ , it says tartly.  _ And you’ve slept for far too long already. I have need of you still, my Pilot. Within a day I shall find the foe and know from whence it comes, and then we must be ready to do battle. It is not—what were those ugly purple things we used to fight in Triangulum? _

“Galra?”

_ I like ugly purple things better. The MFEs are so much prettier— _

“Focus, pal.”

_ Not Galra, that is what I meant. I will alert the other one with glasses to the threat, and you must take back enough quintessence to let you rest properly. But before you can sleep you will have to remain awake long enough to tell your friends that you will be all right.  _

“I really need some kind of messaging system so I can talk to people directly,” says Adam, discouraged. “I know Sam and Colleen are too busy, but maybe Takashi can get Katie on that.”

_ I will ask on your behalf after the foe has been dealt with, if you are not well enough to do it yourself,  _  promises the Atlas.  _ Now, reach out and take whatever you have need of.  _

“Uh, how exactly do I do that?” 

_ Just take it, Pilot.  _ After a minute or two he finds that it really is that simple, and retreats without the lingering ache and exhaustion weighing on his mind. A nap would still do him good, he thinks, but he’s no longer hanging on the verge of a collapse. 

_ Oh, look.  _

“What is it?” He’s too busy drifting off back to sleep to pay much attention, until—

_ Takashi’s come to see you.  _ The Atlas sounds so wickedly delighted that it jerks him right back to consciousness.  _ And look, he’s brought you flowers.  _

“Don’t look at him before  _ I  _ can!” Adam cries. He jumps into the video feed and peers at Takashi’s back, uncomfortably aware of the Atlas crowding up close beside him. 

_ Not my fault you were falling asleep. What are they called, the flowers?  _

“I can’t see. His back is turned.”

_ Well, tell him to move then.  _

He does, and watches in tender contentment as Takashi looks up at the camera screen and back to Adam’s still face. When the camera swivels on its arm to track him Takashi bursts into tears, dropping his bunch of marigolds on Iverson’s chair before kissing the glass in the viewing panel just above Adam’s lips. 

_ Oh, Takashi _ —

But for once Adam pays no mind at all to the ship’s good-natured teasing, and sends forth all his heart and soul to the makeshift Morse interpreter. 

“I’m here, sweetheart. I can see you, and hear you. I’m okay, Takashi. It’s going to be okay. I love you so much, my moonlight,  _ so much _ —”

Takashi cries all the harder at that, and kisses the glass between them until his lips grow sore. Later there will be fear, he knows, and a fight with some thing of malice the Atlas cannot yet find. But for now there is only the heartbreaking joy of seeing Takashi again, and the knowledge—if not the sense of it—that their hands are touching once more. 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> find me on tumblr at @datboicomehere if you want to chat? :3


	11. Chapter 11

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Shiro is far too young to have four children, and spaceships are actually really hard to deal with.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Your sweet comments are giving me life, y'all. Keep them coming, they sustain me :D :D  
> Thank you all so much for your feedback! It really encourages me to keep writing, so...without further ado, have some tired Space Dad + the Atlas.

The Atlas is launched three mornings after Adam regains consciousness, with a crew of roughly seventy on board. Romelle and Acxa remain behind at the Garrison, as does Coran; neither Adam nor the Atlas expect the mission to take very long, as they’re scheduled to meet whatever adversary is approaching them roughly four days from now and then return by the end of the month. There is a single last-minute addition to the mission roster, however—Veronica Hernandez-McClain, an analyst from one of the Garrison’s sister campuses in Miami.

Needless to say, Lance accepts his sister’s arrival with the smallest amount of grace possible.  

*    *    *

“It’s _dangerous_ out here, Vero!”

“Well, it’s dangerous for you too, and—”

“Come on, Lance. The Garrison requested her specifically.”

“I don’t _care!_ ”

Shiro rubs the bridge of his nose and sighs. “I know you’re concerned about your sister, but it’s really a moot point by now, don’t you think? We left the solar system nine hours ago.”

“Moot points are Lance’s forte. He gets it from me,” snorts Veronica. “I am _four_ years older than you, Lance. And I was here in Maricopa when the Galra arrived, anyway. I’ve already been into space and watched a bunch of purple ships get blown up somewhere near Neptune, and then I saw Iverson _cry_. That scared me more than the evil furry aliens, let me tell you.”

“Technically, you’re seven years older now,” Pidge interjects, looking up from the messaging system she and Hunk are working on for Adam. “We lost three years back when we were stuck in the rift, so Lance is still only eighteen.”

“I still don’t like it. We’re going to be there and back before long, and _still—_ I just don’t want you in danger, you know?”

“I know, little brother,” soothes Veronica. “And I know the Garrison doesn’t particularly like sending family together on missions either, but I really am one of the best at my job. I’m here to make the journey safer for everyone, not keep an eye on you, okay? I know you can look after yourself.”

“We look after each other,” Keith pipes up, sending Lance yet another of those strange soft looks he’s been making since they got back to Earth. “We always do. I— _we’ll_ keep him safe.”

Shiro puts his head in his hands. Even he and Adam hadn’t been so obvious back when they were in school, or at least he hopes they weren’t. “Of course. Now is this discussion over? The four of you should be in bed, and I need at least eight teenager-free hours of rest if I’m going to be of any use tomorrow.” Veronica seems to agree with him, since she kisses Lance goodbye and escapes the moment the words are out of his mouth.

“I’m twenty-one.”

“You’re still nineteen to me, Keith. Now buzz off.”

His brother gasps in offense. “ _Adam_ would never have told me to buzz off. And hey, I sleep here too!”

“Go bunk with Lance and the others in their room tonight. I’m sure they’d love to have you.”

“Yeah, we would!” says Hunk, finally taking off his headphones. “The three of us are going to pack together in the biggest bed, so you can join the cuddle pile if you want? Or you can just sleep in one of the other bunks if that’s more your thing.”

“There’ll probably be enough space for Keith on Lance’s side of the bed.” Pidge yawns and holds up her arms, a gesture that Lance understands right away—he’s at her side a second later, crouching down to the ground so she can get on his back. “Onward, noble steed. To our quarters.”

This last is almost completely muffled by Lance’s jacket, but still he turns and gallops off down the hall while Hunk brings up the rear with Pidge’s equipment.

Keith whirls around on his heel and stares at Shiro in horror.

“Dsadfghjkl,” he splutters.

“Did you seriously just keysmash with your mouth? I’m impressed.”

“ _Adam_ would never—”

“Adam’s just as sick and tired of your pining as the rest of us are, Keith. Now don’t keep Lance waiting.”

_“Shiro!_ ”

*    *    *

Shiro never really intended go to bed after the younger paladins left (tired pseudo-guardian of three chaos-loving teenagers though he is), which was why he decided to send Keith with the others in the first place. His brother still worries endlessly over his health, and if Keith sees him sneaking out of their bedroom in the middle of the night there will almost certainly be some kind of grim price he’ll have to pay later. So he waits without making a sound until the chatter from the room across the hall grows quiet; Pidge and Keith fall silent first, while Lance and Hunk talk for a little while longer about butterflies, mermaids, and, inexplicably, ice fishing. At nearly midnight Hunk begins to yawn and mumbles a soft “g’night, Lance,” before drifting off, and five minutes later Shiro springs into action. He puts on his black lion slippers (which Lance had saved from the Castle of Lions, along with all the rest of his things) and slips away down the hall, hurrying towards the little hold that houses Adam’s containment chamber.

Inside he finds Adam fast asleep, as he’d expected; the light that ebbs and flows at his heart mirrors the pattern of his breathing, which is slow and steady against the underside of the glass. The camera over the door stays in place as he walks through the room, and once he’s certain that Adam can’t hear he addresses the device directly.

“I know you’re there.”

The hold illuminates around him as if by magic, brightening back to the daylight setting as every bulb in the room snaps on. Adam’s Morse interpreter buzzes twice and emits a crackle of static, flickering to life like a tired child woken too soon from a nap. Shiro steps closer and stares at its orange screen, squinting in the sudden brilliance of the room as a sentence darkens the display.

_I thought you might come to see me while he was sleeping._

A chill runs down his spine when he realizes exactly what he is talking to—intelligence and feeling without either body or mind, unless he counts Adam’s. Suddenly the ship’s awareness frightens him almost unspeakably, but before he can turn and run from the room the Atlas speaks again.

_You want to take back my Pilot, don’t you?_

“Your pilot?” asks Shiro, momentarily distracted. As far as he knows the Atlas is running on autopilot, and mostly directed and maintained by Mrs. Holt’s custom software. “Who do you mean?”

The siphon on Adam’s chest pulses as if in response, and Shiro nods.

_I can’t. Surely you know that._

“He’s given you enough,” he snaps, dimly aware of his hands curling up into fists at his sides. “Let someone else take his place. He nearly worked himself to death for you—he almost _died_ that night, and you told him not to let us help, you _forced him—_ ”

_I have forced nothing from Adam_ , says the ship, and Shiro senses its anger as if it had shouted aloud. _All he did he did of his own accord, and it was in part the sorrow you gave him that drove him here to me. If not for my intervention his grief would have killed him in the end—perhaps he would have embraced it, even, and it would have been your fault._

He suspected as much, of course, but the pain of hearing it spoken is worse than thinking about it. Shiro still can’t argue, though; when he kissed Adam goodbye at the launch site he was still the dearly beloved brother to three adoring sisters, and both father and brother to Keith who once glued shut the locker of a classmate who had called Adam “four-eyes.” But by his twenty-fourth birthday Keith was missing and Shiro was legally dead, and then by the twenty-fifth—

_I know all that he knows, Takashi. Every thought, every memory. There is no good in denying that you hurt him, on your part._

“What are you angry at me for?” he sighs, dropping like a stone into Iverson’s empty chair. “Is—is _he_ angry?”

_No, he is not. After all, you were young and foolish then, and now...well, you’re not quite whole, but you’re not putting yourself in danger either. What happened to the arm?_

“I lost it while—wait, are you trying to distract me?” says Shiro incredulously. He’ll never forget that the Atlas is sentient after this. “You are, aren’t you? You don’t want to talk about Adam. Why?”

_His pain is my pain, no matter how small or great,_ the Atlas returns, seeming almost distant. _Grief is new to me. I ache whenever I think of his even in passing, and beyond that I would not betray his trust even to you. He is all that I am, or have ever been, and I guard your planet and all the rest for Adam’s sake alone. I love him more than life, Takashi. You understand, don’t you?_

He does understand that sentiment, better perhaps than he’s ever understood anything. Shiro still can’t fathom how Adam tolerated the worst of his illness without breaking down; even in the hospital he was just as steady as usual, discussing treatment options and helping Shiro choose his medication as if the diagnosis was no more catastrophic than a trip to the nearby drugstore. But he was never indifferent, not even for a minute—throughout those two months he refused to let Shiro eat so much a bite of hospital food, driving back home to cook his favorite dishes every night and lugging up a bag of insulated Tupperware in the morning—and whenever he was coherent enough to listen Adam talked to him endlessly, about all the gossip they’d missed at the Garrison and the group of upperclassmen Keith had made friends with.

Shiro knows he wouldn’t have been able to do half of those things, if Adam had been the one lying broken and forlorn in a narrow white hospital bed. He barely survived each one of Adam’s colds, even—the sight of him coughing and feverish was too much for Shiro to bear, and once right after they graduated he used about four hours’ worth of mobile minutes asking nurses all over the county if Adam’s hundred-and-two-degree fever warranted a trip to the emergency room. It’s almost painful how much Shiro loves him, how desperately he needs him to be safe; the moment he watched Adam’s heart stop beating was torture worse than losing his arm to the gladiator ring, and it’s driving him slowly mad to know it could happen again.

“Please,” he says aloud. “If you love him too—let someone else do this, _please._ Let me take his place, if you don’t want anyone else—if you have his memories you know me as well as he does, right? I wouldn’t go until everything was over, I swear it. I’d stay with you the rest of my life if you needed me to.”

_He has more need of me than I do of him_ , replies the Atlas, sending the letters one by one across the screen as if it’s thinking. _His heart is safe here, I think. I would not let him go until it is fully healed._

“ _Safe?_ He—you—what do you mean by that?”

_The world cannot hurt him while he is with me. There is nothing that can._

“But he _is_ getting hurt with you, he’s been hurt already! Please—”

_I will not stand for any other but my Pilot_ , says the ship, cutting him off. _I will not be parted from him, and that is all_ . _Good night, Takashi._

Shiro recognizes the dismissal for what it is; the lights go out scarcely a moment later, and when he steps into the hallway the door to the hold slams shut in his wake with a clang.

When he ends up back in his room, sleep doesn’t find him again until close to morning.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> come hang out with me on tumblr at @datboicomehere!! :D :D <3


	12. Chapter 12

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which there is a Ton of backstory.

Sometimes, Adam wonders how Takashi fell in love with him in the first place.

In some ways, the two of them were the same—foreign and bookish and stubborn and a little afraid of living in the States for so long, though Takashi had moved to Texas from Japan when he was only six. They both loved their fields of study, and strove night and day to excel in them—but here the similarities ended, though Takashi (with his eyes drawn away to the heavens as they were) never noticed it until the last few weeks before Kerberos. Adam still doesn’t know for sure what would have become of them if Takashi hadn’t been so enamored by his flying all those years ago, but he likes to think a bit of separation would only have made their romance a little more inevitable.

After all, that’s how it had been in Shindola with his own mother and father.

By rights, the paths of Ashim Ahluwalia and Yasmeen Umarzai ought never to have crossed; Ashim was the son of a strawberry farmer, and spent most of his days between the fields and the market in the nearby city, close to the headquarters of the military intelligence directorate.

It was there beside the M. I. building that Ashim met Yasmeen, the summer he turned twenty-four. Sometimes on her way home from the directorate she passed his booth in the fruit market and bought small baskets of strawberries, but no matter how often he saw her Ashim never dared speak to her. Every Wednesday she came to the stall in her headscarf and uniform and laid her coins on his table without touching his sunbrowned fingers, and after he took the money and filled her basket she departed with only a stately nod of approval in his direction.

They did not speak as anything more than vendor and customer until that Deepavali, when Ashim brought six coolers full of homemade sweets to sell alongside the strawberries for Naraka Chaturdasi. He had gone through most of his produce by the time Yasmeen stopped by with a friend, laughing softly at the shining sweetmeats lined up in their trays.

“I didn’t know you grew sweets on your strawberry farm,” she quipped, holding out her basket to receive the usual pound of fruit. “Give me two boxes of kalakand and another of gajar halva, please. And—”

“Get the malai chamcham, too,” called the girl behind her. “That ought to be enough for Vivaan Uncle if you’re going to the mandir tonight.”

“We are,” said Yasmeen distractedly, counting out a handful of bills. “I’ll take them then.”

“You’re going to a mandir?” Ashim was so startled by this that he dropped his reel of thread for the boxes into the dust. “But I thought—”

“My father’s Hindu,” she explained. “We celebrate all the festivals at our house, so here I am, buying sweets for Diwali.”

This conversation—the first during which either of them spoke about more than the quality and price of the berries—was a kind of beginning for Ashim, and by that December he and Yasmeen were close enough to call each other friends. Over the months their friendship grew into something a little deeper, something no longer confined to the street between the market and the directorate; by the middle of March Yasmeen began dropping by his fruit stall twice a week, and instead of bicycling home directly she and Ashim went for rambles through the city and talked about everything under the sun, from funny recollections of Ashim’s college days to the adventures Yasmeen had been swept up in while she was abroad.

But by his twenty-fifth birthday his parents (knowing nothing of their son’s blooming romance) began talking of finding him a wife, and when they first brought up the subject to Ashim he shot them down even before he realized he had opened his mouth.

“What do you mean, no? Ashim, _beta_ , it’s been so long since you finished university, and we’d like it if you at least thought about it.”

“There’s a girl,” he blurted, wringing a roti between his hands until it tore in half. “I—a friend of mine I know from the city. I haven’t said anything to her, but I’d like to date her properly for a while if she’ll have me before we go talking about marriage.”

“There he goes with all his college thinking,” grumbled his mother. “ _Date_ her? And give her the impression that you don’t respect her enough to let her parents settle things with us the right way?”

“ _Amma_ , it’s the twenty-second century,” his elder sister chimed in. “I dated Rudra, and—”

“Rudra did not _date_ you, Uma. You told us you wanted to marry him, and even though you didn’t right away there was never any question that you _wouldn’t._ ”

“What’s your friend’s name?” asked his brother-in-law, speaking over the others.

“Yasmeen,” Ashim answered. “Yasmeen Umarzai.”

Uma raised an eyebrow.

“Yasmeen?”

“We’re _not_ having this discussion,” declared Ashim. He got up out of his chair. “It doesn’t matter that she’s not—we could make it work, her parents did! I like her, Dad, and if you don’t—”

“Calm down, son,” said his father, alarmed. “Nobody’s objecting to that. It’s just, well...she’s a city girl, isn’t she? People still look for wives in the villages, but it doesn’t go the other way round. Why would she want to marry a Shindola country boy—what does she do, anyway?”

“She works at the military directorate. And you’re right that I don’t have anything much to offer her, but—”

“Landed families aren’t so common these days,” Uma pointed out. “We’re wealthier than most city people, everybody knows it. And you have a masters in engineering from UND, so if it’s a more conventional life she wants you can always move. You’re more than just a farm boy, Ashim. Don’t forget that.”

“But I’m not really more than a farm boy, am I? I went to college for nothing in the end.”

“Ashim, _baba_ ,” soothed his mother, fixing her husband with a glare. “Don’t think like that before you’ve even tried. Talk to your Yasmeen, and if she turns you down there’s nothing more you can do—but first you must be honest, and put your heart and everything else about you out where she can see it. Of course you’ll never get to marry her if you never _say_ anything! How can she say yes if you never even give her a chance?”

Ashim was far too gone not to see the sense in this, so a few months later (after he and Yasmeen officially started dating) he took her to a rooftop garden near the M. I. building and gave her a ring of gold and silver filigree that he had commissioned himself.

“It’s yours whether you want it or not, Meenu,” he stuttered, looking everywhere save at her smiling face. “I mean, I am, you don’t have to take the ring—though you can keep it even if you say no if you want, or if you’re not ready, since I know it hasn’t been long. You don’t even have to answer right away—or, or, I can go somewhere else right now if you like. Oh, God, someone please stop me from talking—”

“I accept,” laughed Yasmeen, standing like a column of red and violet against the winter sunset. “Oh, come on, _habibi._ What did you think I was going to do? Say no?”

“I mean, yeah,” Ashim gasped. “Look at you! You’ve done such incredible things, and me—”

“It’s you who ought to think twice about marrying me.”

“What—no, absolutely not—”

“I know you love me, Ashim,” she interrupted. “I’ve known from the beginning.”

“You did?”

“Of course, honey. You were so obvious about it.”

“Oh,” he mumbled. “I thought I only looked at you when you couldn’t see me.”

“You always started looking at your watch at ten minutes to six, waiting for me to come out of the directorate,” smiled Yasmeen. “I could see to your stall from my office window. But that...that isn’t the point, I guess.”

She sighed and stared out over the balustrade, toying with the tassels on her headscarf as Ashim took a step closer.

“What is it then, Meenu?”

“I’m being reassigned,” she confessed, taking in a deep breath. “I’ve been meaning to tell you for weeks, but I...I just couldn’t work up the nerve. The life you’ve had, with your family—I won’t be able to give that to you, Ashim. I’m going to have to spend about half of each year away on field missions after this coming April. Any time they send me I might never come back, and if we had children they’d mostly grow up without me either way. Don’t—oh, sweetheart, don’t look so scared, I’m not going to expect you to want—”

“I do!” cried Ashim, pressing her hands to his heart. “I— _Yasmeen_ , I’d want you any way you came. There are people that need you, _mere jaan_ —what kind of person would I be if I tried to hold you back? I love you for who you are, and what you do, and if it means I’ll spend half my life waiting for you to come back—then that’s the life I’ll have! And if we did have children I’d tell them every night that their mother was out there somewhere under the stars, saving the lives of people she didn’t even know—I’d be so proud of you, Meenu, and so would they, no matter how hard it was.”

Yasmeen began her field work six months later, shortly after a courthouse wedding witnessed only by two passersby called in from the street. She came and went from the old grey house in Shindola like the North wind, Ashim thought—never staying long, but filling the place with such peerless joy while she was there that her husband was sustained until she returned again.

The year they were twenty-seven they had their first child, Rukmini, who had her father’s dark hair and skin and her mother’s tawny eyes. Nothing save their marriage had ever made Ashim happier, and when Yasmeen went away he tied his new daughter to his back and went out to work in the fields beside his sister and brother-in-law.

Though Yasmeen never spent more than three consecutive months in Shindola, Rumi was by no means the only child they had; in due time came the twins, Padmini and Chandramukhi (who later chose to go by her middle name, Mallika) and last of all Adam, when Ashim was thirty-five.

“This one is mine,” Yasmeen had cooed, propped up in the four-poster bed with her daughters crowding close and begging to see their new little brother. “The girls all take after you, darling—look at his _hair,_ Ashim! It’s nearly as light as mine is.”

“And he matches me for skin tone,” laughed Ashim. “Rumi, Chandra, _gently_ —see how tiny his fingers are, _beta?_ You need to be more careful.”

When Yasmeen was gone again her husband was left melancholy for the first time, though for weeks he could not quite understand why. Somehow Ashim felt that it was the beginning of the end, and in a way he was right; Yasmeen came home less and less after that, and her calls and letters spoke more often of peril and injury than anything else. But the loving remembrances to him and the little ones did not cease, and often she wrote out pages of funny stories for their children in English and added the truth of what she had witnessed abroad in hurriedly-scripted Urdu, which none of the family but Ashim could read. When Rumi and Padma asked what the postscripts meant he said that they were love-notes, and maintained the little white lie until Mallika began studying the Persian alphabet in high school.

But despite his unease the years flew by much as they always had, for the children kept him laughing from dawn to dusk with their mischief; all four of them had inherited their mother’s energy, and seemed to have made it their own sacred mission to keep their father happy. Rumi and the twins accomplished this by getting into scrapes right and left, while the baby Adam (trying to follow his sisters' example) usually just fell into puddles and squeaked until someone came along to fish him out.

Before Ashim had realized it Adam was five and starting school, tripping down the dusty road each morning with Rumi holding his hand and a minute bag on his shoulders. On orientation-day the small boy looked around and saw his friends’ mothers kissing them goodbye, and though Ashim had embraced him most tenderly before seeing him off he felt himself somehow broken. By the end of the first week he could scarcely sleep at night for want of his own _amma_ , and when Ashim put his head into the nursery one evening after the older children had gone to bed he found Adam curled up on the windowsill and sobbing into a pillow.

“Adam, _beta?_ ” he whispered, edging between his nephew’s bed and Padmini’s to reach his whimpering son. “What’s the matter, baby? Are you hurting anywhere?”

“I’m hurting _here_ ,” cried Adam, striking himself in the chest with one tiny fist. “I want my _amma!_ Everybody else has theirs—why won’t Mummy come home? Doesn’t she want us, Papa?”

For a while Ashim only held him close, sitting silently in the moonlight until Adam ran out of tears. When at last he wiped his face Ashim kissed his forehead and carried him into the study, balancing Adam on his hip as he opened the filing cabinet and took out a small framed picture of a woman with two young girls. Adam took it and frowned at the three blurry faces, leaving sticky jam-prints on the polished glass until Ashim tugged it away from him.  

“Do you know who they are, darling?”

“No, Papa. Did I ever meet them?”

“You haven’t, baby. But there was going to be an attack near their city only a few months after Padma and Chandra were born, and if your _amma_ hadn’t managed to get a bomb disposal squad into the terrorists’ headquarters hundreds of children and their mothers and fathers might have died. These two girls in the photo only made it because of Yasmeen, and there are so many more people she’s protecting than you can count, _habibi_. Remember when she told you that mummy and Papa take care of you in different ways?”

“I remember.”

“I take care of you like other children’s parents do, _beta._ But your mother is out there fighting so that Shindola stays safe, along with every other town and city from here all across the country. She’s not only your mummy, or my wife, _mere jaan—_ she belongs to everyone. Do you think you can share her?”

For a minute there was only silence, and then the little boy nodded and buried his face in his father’s neck.

“I _guess_ I could,” he said, snuggling deeper into Ashim’s nightshirt. “If I can share Mummy with Rumi, I can share her with anyone.”

“That’s my brave little soldier,” Ashim laughed, hugging his son until he squealed in protest. “I’m so proud of you, my Adam.”

“But she would come home if she could, right?” Adam persisted. “If everywhere was safe, and nobody needed her anymore?”

“You know, I don’t think she would,” mused his father. “I think she’d rather whisk us away to go on some grand adventure, like the girls in your storybooks. She’d take us to see volcanoes, and to the sea to go diving for pearls—all over the continent so we could see the world, and enjoy ourselves like kings and queens until we couldn’t take one more step. Would you like that, _beta?_ ”

“I would, I would!” shouted Adam, clapping his hands together. “When will it be all safe then, Papa?”

“Not for a very long time,” Ashim sighed. “But Mummy always says you’re the most patient boy, right? What do you think you should do?”

“ _Wait_ ,” huffed the tot, wilting like a dried-up flower. “I will, if it’ll make Mummy happy.”

“Oh, sweetheart. You made her happier than anything the day you were born, you know? You don’t have to be patient for that.”

*    *    *

The little house in Shindola conducted itself just as it always did over the next eight years. Of course there were a few alterations, some much worse than others—such as the death of Ashim’s mother when Adam was seven, and Rumi’s departure for college when he was ten. But school and play and market-days went on just as usual, and until Adam’s thirteenth birthday his life in the strawberry fields was one of utter bliss.

He was fast friends with all the village boys, and after classes were over they played cricket on the way home—sometimes staying out until long past sunset, to Ashim’s eternal despair. On the afternoon of Adam’s birthday they left their equipment in the schoolyard and congregated near a local cow pond, quizzing each other for the next morning’s recitation before pulling off their clothes and jumping into the pool for a swim. Adam was caught up in a water fight with his cousin Shanti when he heard the purr of an engine, and as he turned to face the road he saw a smart black Vectra rolling up alongside them. The children were used to seeing fancy vehicles in town, mostly on rent to tourists—but this one was spattered with dust and dirt as if it had driven for hours, and the two men sitting in the front were dressed in light-brown uniforms. As Adam sat staring in the cow pond one of the men got out and took off his jacket, muttering under his breath before glancing down at Shanti.

“Do you know where Ashim Ahluwalia lives, little miss?”

“He’s my father, sir,” called Adam, hauling himself out of the water. “You—you’re—”

“Show us the way,” said the other man, cutting him off. “We...we have bad news, _beta_ , about your mother.”

Adam still doesn’t remember much about the walk home, only that he stumbled there with Shanti crying and clinging to his arm and the other children trailing behind the car at a distance. When Ashim looked up from his afternoon tea on the porch and saw them coming through the fields he screamed until he was hoarse, and by the time the officers reached him the poor man was hardly conscious. They had known Yasmeen, they told him, and tasked themselves with the duty of bringing her things and a few unsent letters back to her family.

Ashim was in no state to look at the letters, and did not even ask what had become of his wife’s body; all her squadron ever knew was that she went missing during an air raid, and that later her gold and silver wedding ring—so distinctive that everyone she had worked with could recognize it on sight—was uncovered somewhere in the rubble. That night while his father wept in the prayer room Adam sat alone in the shed behind the house, holding the box of his mother’s things as his cousins sniffled in the garden.

At last he found the strength to look inside, lifting out Yasmeen’s Koran and three plain headscarves—and then the ring, which some kind lieutenant had cleaned and wrapped in silk. There were five sealed envelopes, addressed to their cottage in Shindola, and the book of Urdu fairy tales his mother used to carry wherever she went, whether to the market on weekdays or across the river for picnics...and lastly a glove and a tiny photo album, which held the pictures of her husband and children beside her parents’ wedding portrait.

“ _Amma,_ ” he cried, bursting into tears as he looked at the photograph of himself as a six-month-old baby, bouncing in Mallika’s arms as Yasmeen held them both in her lap. “No, no, you promised you’d come back, you _promised—_ ”

But Yasmeen was gone, and no matter how often he prayed to meet her in his dreams Adam never once saw his mother again.

*    *    *

_Takashi,_

_I know you’ve always been the better one at communicating, between the two of us. When you talk you bare your whole heart to me and beg me to listen, and maybe I don’t listen as much as I should. But I listened last night when we fought, and I think I could explain things a lot better in writing than I did yesterday while we were trying to keep our voices down so Keith wouldn’t hear us arguing. You know I’ve always had a problem with repressing things, moonlight. I hope it’ll be easier on paper. Or maybe it won’t be, and I’ll have wasted all this ink for nothing._

 _Do you remember the day we met, love? I always said I felt like I recognized you, like our souls were coming together after far too much time apart. And I still feel that way, darling. Dad used to tell me that he and I were the same, bound to the earth and destined to love people who were meant for the stars. I’d never hold you back for my sake, Takashi, or even Keith’s. If something happened to you in the line of duty I’d be able to go on, somehow, and I’d make sure Keith stayed safe and happy if it were the last thing I did. I’m from a military family, remember? I know what it’s like to wait and hold down the fort at home, and not know if the person you love is okay. I know what it’ll do to me if you go on the mission, but that’s beside the point. I’m not a factor in this decision, and that’s how it should be. This is your life_ _at risk, not mine, and you need to understand that the mission isn’t worth it._

 _If you were going somewhere with the relief corps, to rescue people who_ needed _you, that would be worth it even if there was almost no chance you’d come back. And I’d wait for you, like my father waited for my mother, because he knew his grief was nothing in the face of the good she did. Takashi, you can’t throw away everything you’ve ever loved or worked for to get a few ice samples at the edge of the solar system. That research won’t be helping anybody, though I haven’t dared say so to Matt and Sam. You’re picking the most dangerous mission the Garrison’s ever flown just to prove yourself, because you can’t accept that you’ve already proved yourself about a hundred times over._

_You’ve broken every record there is to break, sweetheart—nobody from our generation thinks of you as anything less than the greatest pilot the country’s ever seen, and the fact that you might end up killing yourself just for one more accolade—I can’t accept that as a rational decision. You can’t make choices like this out of desperation, or anger; you need to gather your wits about you, and think about this calmly. Technology’s going to advance. All your records are going to be broken eventually, by people who aren’t even born yet if not by our peers. Going to Kerberos won’t stop that from happening. There have been pilots before you who did incredible things, and now nobody outside the history program even remembers their names. My students don’t remember anyone from the Titan crew, and that was just thirty years ago._

_I can’t stand by and watch you do this, Takashi. I can’t just kiss you goodbye before one last joyride, because if, God willing, you do come back—you’ll find something else, something just as meaningless to distract you, and if that’s the life you want there won’t be room for me in it. I’ll be yours until my dying day, moonlight, but I won’t have my heart broken for your pleasure. I deserve better, and so does Keith._

_So if you do decide to go, don’t expect me to be here when you get back._

_All my love always,_

_Adam._

 

  
  



	13. Chapter 13

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which there is grief, and tenderness.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you all so much for your sweet comments, guys. They leave me speechless every time.

“We’re getting close, huh?”

_I suppose we are,_ muses the Atlas. _The sensors are drawing much less from me now than they did back on Earth, and our quarry is not so different from me._

It frowns at this, and folds its arms across its shimmering chest; it still surprises Adam that it _has_ a face and body now, if the smoky way the Atlas manifests in his subconscious can be called that. Now he and the ship look at each other face-to-face when they talk, which puzzled Adam so much when it first started happening that he stopped trying to figure it out somewhere in the middle of Andromeda. Frankly, he’s not sure that the Atlas isn’t _magic_ , a conjecture that would scandalize Sam ten different ways if he knew—but science and reason can’t explain half of what goes on in Adam’s life lately, as much as he wishes it did.

“So we’re hunting something that’s like you?” he asks, folding his legs beneath him. He knows his physical body hasn’t moved in years, but it’s nice to have the feeling all the same. “Something just as powerful?”

_As powerful as I am?_ it scoffs, and Adam grins at the note of pride in its voice. _I should think not, my Pilot. As if your heart-strength has a match in this realm, or the next._

“Heart-strength? What do you mean by that?”

_You know I had a...well, a bit of a quarrel with your Takashi. Remember?_

“I do, and let me just say I never expected a ship to throw down with my fiance over my broken heart.”

_Never mind that, Adam. When he came to the hold two nights ago he asked if someone else could take your place, and offered to do it himself. I refused, and told him I would not be parted from you—but it is more than that, my Pilot, though certainly I love you far too dearly to let you go. I do not know if there is a difference between your quintessence and the rest, but I would not have gained a mind of my own with anyone else, at least. This I know._

“Really?” says Adam doubtfully. “I don’t see why, though. I’m not particularly strong.”

_It is more the quality of it than the amount_ , _I think. If I had to hazard a guess I would say all the hearts of your kind yield near-identical amounts of quintessence with each pulse, but yours is nothing like the others’._

“What’s so different about it?”

_You do not keep it,_ sighs the ship. _Heart-quintessence ought to remain within the body it comes from, or at least it does with your friends, but yours comes to me of its own accord. That is why the foe does not frighten me, Adam—I cannot tell yet what strength you have given me, but somehow—_

“I felt it,” Adam whispers. “Back when you finished your shifting. It was like water rushing out of me, but it didn’t hurt, not at all.”

_Exactly_ . _It was the strain on your heart that put you in danger then, not any loss of quintessence. You ought not to be able to surrender it as you do, but here you have yielded every drop you make for the last two years and more without suffering at all._

“Do you think what we’re searching for might be a ship like you, then? Powered by someone like me?”

_There is nobody like you_ , murmurs the Atlas. It taps at the surface of Adam’s mind, diving into his memories and dragging them up to the light—broken glimpses of a joyful father and three sisters who followed their mother to her grave, of a dark-haired child so dearly beloved that it ruined Adam to lose him—and Takashi, always Takashi, bright-eyed and bold as a bird of paradise in the years before his illness and driven to anguish after, alive and breathing in Adam’s heart as if he were part of his body—

_Do you see, my Pilot? Do you see?_

*    *    *

Ashim Ahluwalia had been a lover of stories.

Perhaps he had to be; after all, his children were never content to play by themselves on rainy days, and after he settled the cows in their shed and came back indoors to build up the fire (which the family preferred over central heating, to keep mosquitoes away from the house) Padmini and Mallika hurried to sit on his lap, begging him for a tale or two until he laughed and gave in. Rumi always came in a few minutes later, red-cheeked from the warmth of the kitchen where she liked to study—and with Adam riding on her back or shoulders, chewing solemnly on the ends of her long black braids despite being told about ten times a day to leave them alone.

Those afternoons make up some of Adam’s most treasured memories, and though they’re doomed to stay just that it never really hurt him. His childhood was far too precious for grief, he thinks, and still clear as daylight regardless of all the time that’s passed.

After the double blow of Takashi’s diagnosis and Ashim’s death scarcely five weeks later, Adam spent the next month or so in a state of shock, half-convinced every time he opened his eyes in the morning that he was at home again, crossing off the days on the calendar until his mother’s return. There was no one there then, to offer him a hand when he cried, or send him to bed when he fell asleep in the kitchen; Keith and Takashi needed him, and so he kept his tears for a handful of closets at the Garrison and never faltered once where they could see. It was lonely, certainly, but there was nothing to be done about it—a little self-control for Keith’s sake was nothing, and crying only made him feel worse anyway.

On one bright Sunday in August he woke with a weight on his chest, and a tuft of dark hair brushing against his lips. Adam managed a smile at that, and dropped twenty kisses one by one across Takashi’s forehead; his boyfriend was much less averse to getting out of bed on weekends if Adam had kissed him thoroughly beforehand, and comfortable as he was Keith would probably wake up hungry for breakfast before long. But Takashi was far too heavy for him to move, though Adam was (and always had been) taller—so they lay together for a while without speaking, with only a breath of laughter now and then as Takashi poked his side in a silent demand for more kisses.

“You know I’d happily do nothing but kiss you until we fall asleep again,” he murmured at last. “But I’d rather not find out just yet if Keith’s as clumsy as you are in the kitchen, if it’s all the same to you.”

“He knows what to do if the stove catches fire,” Takashi smiled, kissing the loop of coarse white thread by Adam’s collar. “And I don’t think he’ll even be up until noon, sunshine. Matt and Katie roped him into playing some kind of VR game yesterday, and he was still awake when I went to get water around three.”

“Oh, Keith,” groaned Adam. “Takashi, it’s too close to the school year for him to be doing stuff like this. How’s he going to adjust to getting up at six for drills if he stays up all night playing games?”

“He’ll be fine, angel.”

“And I’d better not find out that you let him in a training craft with sleep deprivation when school starts again, you hear me? If he’s yawning even a little, you make sure he stays in the sims.”

“Of course, love.”

“Same goes for the hoverbike. And for you, too.”

“We’ll be _fine,_ Adam,” Takashi soothed him, burrowing further into his shirt. “And as for the hoverbikes, I’ve been thinking of buying one for Keith when he turns thirteen. It’s time he learns, don’t you think?”

“No need for that,” Adam sighed. “We can’t really afford a bike with all the good safety features right now, and I don’t ride mine anyway. We’ll fake engine troubles or something when October comes around, and send it to that one place James knows for a good coat of paint. Then he can get all the guards installed.”

“Are you sure?” Takashi propped himself up on his elbows and frowned. “But—”

“Well, nobody’s using it. And I’m pretty sure Keith only likes yours better because it’s red.”

“How did buying his new clothes go while I was in the hospital?”

“He went with Matt and Katie, because he didn’t want me to leave you. Do you know what I saw when he Skyped me after that, moonlight? _Jeggings._ Jeggings, a pair of red combat boots, and about fifteen black undershirts without anything to go over them.”

There was no answer to that, and Adam opened his eyes to find Takashi staring down at him with a stricken look on his face.

“Sweetheart?”

“You’re sad,” whispered his boyfriend. “Something’s wrong, isn’t it? Something—oh _no,_ don’t cry, don’t cry—what’s the matter, honey? Tell me—”

Somehow he had started crying so hard that he could no longer see, and as Takashi pulled him close Adam sobbed aloud for the first time since the nightmare began, in the back of a Garrison ambulance with Takashi unconscious in front of him. More often than not he woke in the darkness and prayed for one wild minute that everything had only been a dream—but when morning came it brought the truth back with it, trapping him in place so that he could scarcely move or think or _breathe_ . And still, _still—_

All it had taken to loosen his tongue was for Takashi to notice he was breaking.

“My father,” he sobbed, burying his face in Takashi’s neck. “He, he had a stroke, about two weeks after you were admitted. My sisters called, and asked me to come home—but I didn’t go, and I—”

“Oh, God. All this time, and you didn’t say—you stayed here when he needed you, for _me?_ But—but you can go now, love! I’m well enough to go with you, and Keith—”

“It’s too late, moonlight,” Adam wept. “He relapsed about a month later. Rumi and the rest had the funeral without me, since they knew I wouldn’t be coming. He’s gone.”

There were times when the sheer intensity of Takashi’s love overwhelmed him, Adam remembers. That day was definitely one of them: bitter and sweet at once, clouded by grief renewed even as Takashi cradled him to his breast, whispering _I’ve got you_ , and _I love you_ , and _I’ll never let you go, ever._ It had felt so safe to lie there with his head on Takashi’s heart, and hear the beloved pulse beating steady and strong by his cheek—so safe to know there would be no more grieving alone, so long as fate permitted them to face the future together.

After they finally got out of bed Adam went to the low wooden cabinet near his altar, where the pictures of Takashi’s long-dead parents stood alongside an incense holder and a clear glass of water. There were also two white orchids in small blue china pots, and (now that he had thought of it) just enough space for a third small picture between them.

Takashi appeared beside him a moment later, clutching one of Adam’s framed photographs: of Ashim and Yasmeen sitting on a flight of marble stairs, hand in hand and cheek to cheek as they beamed up at the camera. He dusted the glass with a handkerchief and set them down gently between the solemn faces of his own mother and father, shifting the orchids to make room while Adam ducked into the kitchen for matches and a stick of jasmine-scented incense.

“I think they would have liked each other,” Takashi said. “Don’t you?”

In her new setting Himeko Shirogane seemed to be looking straight at Yasmeen, answering the grin on the older woman’s face with a spark of laughter in her eye—one that shone plain as day when she was pretending seriousness, which Takashi had sworn she was on the day the picture was taken. On her other side Takashi’s father seemed only curious, but still as clear-eyed and kind as Takashi himself, and despite the ache in his chest Adam felt his lips turn up in a smile.

“Maybe they already do,” he answered.

He took Takashi’s hand in his and kissed it.

“They’re family now, after all.”

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> come hang out with me on tumblr at @datboicomehere!! <3


	14. Chapter 14

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Adam encounters the Komar mechs.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Guys, I am so sorry for this late update. But since I'm back to school I probably won't be able to post more than once a week, though I'll try for twice and see how it goes! 
> 
> Now, without further ado, have some soft nerds and a Komar mech.

Adam is fast asleep when the Atlas pokes at his consciousness, dreaming peacefully of the shortcakes he used to buy from the bakery near the Garrison—but he’s fully awake only a second later, scrambling at the image it throws against his mind until he can see it clearly.

 _You were right,_ whispers the projection of the Atlas, dropping heavily onto the ground beside him. _It_ is _like me._

“I don’t understand,” Adam mutters, looking at the thermal scan with eyes still fresh from the Garrison’s engineering program. “Its energy signature is closer to yours than anything we fought since the launch, but this is _different—_ it shouldn’t be so distorted now that we’re only a few light-years away. All the stars in its vicinity are coming up clear.”

_It’s moving fast._

“Not as fast as we are,” he reminds it. “I’d say our speed is at least twice as high as this thing’s.”

_It isn’t Galra, Pilot. They had something like this long ago, but it was...not the same. I do not think there is much difference in size, but it feels completely—_

“Off, I know.” Adam frowns. “Sam coded a whole directory of blueprints into your reference folder, didn’t he? Is this like any of them?”

_No, it is not. It is stronger, my Pilot. Much stronger._

“Wake the others.” He stares at the picture and grits his teeth, looking from the mech’s crudely-shaped head—almost like a hammerhead shark’s, he thinks—to the broad chest and slender waist, which remind him so strongly of potter wasps that he shudders and turns away. There’s something wasplike about the whole ship, something _parasitic,_ and the sight of it makes him sick to the stomach he can’t even feel.

 _Unwholesome_ , breathes a voice in the back of his mind. _Unholy._

The voice is his mother’s, rising from the shadows of his memory as if to warn him—and though Adam has not seen the inside of a mosque or temple for the past three years a prayer rises on his lips, spilling out into the heart of the Atlas like ripples moving over water.

 _“I seek refuge with the Lord of daybreak from the evil of what He hath made, and from the wickedness of the night—I seek refuge with the Sustainer of men, the Sovereign—_ ”

*    *    *

Three hours later, everyone aboard the ship is ready at their battle stations. Keith and the rest of the paladins are already in their lions, and the MFE pilots bolted straight into the hangars almost right after the alarm; Iverson and Bradley are in position on the bridge with the Floridian analyst, Veronica, and Sam and Colleen are down in the engine room with some kind of eight-armed alien. Adam can’t tell where exactly Takashi is, but he supposes it’s not important; Takashi doesn’t have a set role except potential pilot as of yet, and the Atlas seems to be flying itself just as adeptly as usual.

But down in the hold Adam can tell that something is different—he senses his heartbeat rising again, just like it did the night the Atlas achieved its final shape. The quintessence drain doesn’t hurt exactly, but the feeling of unease only mounts higher with his pulse, and beside him the Atlas seems no more tranquil than he is.

 _It itches_ , it complains. _That’s what this feeling is called, isn’t it?_

“You’re right,” sighs Adam. Now that he thinks about it his insides feel like they’re trying to crawl right out of his skin, or compressing themselves in an effort to melt away completely. “What are we going to do? You can’t fight that thing like—like _this_ , can you?”

 _What’s that supposed to mean? If I can take on a Galra cruiser I can certainly deal with_ this.

“I doubt it’s going to fight like a cruiser, though,” he points out. “Those things in its arms look like combat weapons, right? We managed to kill the Galra robeasts by turning on the shields and crushing them, but this looks a lot more nimble. It’ll be like trying to squash a cockroach.”

The Atlas briefly searches his mind and ends up at a vague recollection of Takashi fleeing from a roach in their apartment before Keith showed up and killed it with a blowtorch.

 _I see_ , it says, amused. _So you mean that it will be too small and fast for us, then._

“Exactly. Do we have a reading on its size?”

_Not much bigger than Voltron is. But the MFEs would be of help, I think. They’re smaller than the lions, so maneuvering around the Wasp would be better left to them. Let Voltron confront it head-on._

“Send a message with the scans to the bridge,” says Adam miserably. “I’ve already typed up the notes. But is there _any_ explanation for its weird energy signature? I feel like I’m getting sicker the closer we get.”

 _So am I,_ shudders the ship. _And I know why._ _It’s running on stolen quintessence._

“What?”

 _If it were running on its own the scan would have been much less contorted,_ the Atlas explains, pulling up the feed from the sensor that charts their own quintessence. There are only two distinct functions: one that moves without any set pattern in response to the ship’s power requirements, and one whose high and low points resemble a standard sleep-wake cycle. _You and I are only two entities, and it is a simple thing to tell us apart. But once we clear the interference in the Wasp’s energy signature—_

The single graph from before starts multiplying, rapidly tiling the incorporeal ground until Adam can’t see where it ends, and he realizes in dawning horror that each line represents a _person_ , or perhaps a planet or star, drained of strength and will in order to fuel the Wasp on its journey.

“Hold on,” he interrupts, picking up one of the scans. “It hasn’t been moving randomly. It _searched_ for all the others, just like it’s searching for us.”

 _Perhaps we can quicken this, then._ There’s a strange damp coolness in his chest, and then a rush of comfortable warmth as his pulse leaps higher still. _It cannot take anything from you, dearheart, but it will be drawn to your power all the same._

“Why can’t it?” he wonders, taking one of the Atlas’s blue-white hands in his. Somehow he knows what it says is true, though he can’t fathom why. “It drained a star the size of Canis Major in about five minutes, according the scans. Why not me?”

 _Because you are mine, and I am yours_ , replies the ship, as if it’s the simplest thing in the world. _I shall never give up my life to anything but you, Pilot. If you had been forced to surrender your quintessence for me I would never have had the power that I do now, or a soul such as you have given me, and so no matter what faces us you and I will defeat it._

The answer is on the tip of his tongue, and the Atlas knows it outright—knows _why_ his fragile flesh-and-blood body gave rise to a being just as human as he is, if human is the right description. He’s spent so long wondering, ever since he woke from his two-year coma somewhere in the middle of Triangulum—yearning to know how _any of this_ was possible, and now the truth is fluttering somewhere just out of reach, preserved in the utter devotion of a sentient cruiser for its heart.

He is that heart, and he’s only just coming to realize the weight of what it means. But there will be time to think of it later; there’s work to be done for now, and he pushes the revelation aside.

“Send out the lions and the MFEs,” he says at last. “Let’s see what the—”

 _Wait, my Pilot. What if it drains_ them?

Adam halts in his tracks.

“Then they’re not going out there. Those are my students, and _Keith—_ I’ll seal the hangars shut if I have to.”

 _Your Commander will not listen_ , the Atlas warns. _None of them will. Not even your Takashi, or the paladins._

“I have executive command over everything from the control room to the bridge,” Adam snorts. “I’d like to see them argue with me.”

The Atlas laughs at him. _So would I, my Pilot. Are we united in resolve, then?_

“Always.” The word brims up from his deepest heart as if the heavens had willed it, and the Atlas nods its approval. “Until the very end, _piya._ ”

_We have the strength to conquer this, my darling. Do not be afraid._

“I’m tired of conquering,” he murmurs. “I won’t raise a hand against the Wasp, or whatever’s controlling it. That isn’t what’s needed here.”

 _What do you mean?_ The ship is curious, but not concerned, and Adam presses its hand.

“You said it couldn’t take my quintessence, before. But you didn’t say anything about me giving it freely.”

For a moment there is no answer, and then the Atlas smiles.

_What shall I do with you, my heart? I would never have thought of it, never—_

“Just keep the others safe,” Adam whispers. “I keep dreaming, you know. About walking the halls of the Garrison again, right next to Keith so I can see how much he’s grown. About getting to hold Takashi just one more time so I know for sure he’s not sick anymore, or going back to our apartment someday and sleeping in his arms. I want to go _home,_ even if it’s just to say goodbye. But if I can’t be with him—you’ll look after him, won’t you?”

 _You_ will _be with him again, I swear it. Oh, Adam, don’t cry, don’t cry—_

But try as he might he can’t stop the tears from coming, and in the cold vault where his body lies the beacon on his chest grows brighter.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> come hang out with me on tumblr at @datboicomehere!!


	15. Chapter 15

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Pidge appears.

The days after the  _ Theia-Selene’s  _ disappearance were a blur, Adam remembers. There were inquiries, about twelve of them, and then the hasty pitch for the Charon mission—but all of that came to nothing in the end, after the remains of Takashi’s ship were photographed on Kerberos. But before that there was a groaning wail outside the cafeteria one afternoon, and a bleeding communications officer screaming in the Garrison hospital about “the delinquent, Keith Kogane.”

Later that day in Iverson’s office a sergeant told Adam what had happened; the boy with the broken jaw was mocking Keith for Takashi’s supposed failure, though Adam never learned exactly what he said. Keith had hit him across the face with his fist and cracked his own thumb in the process, and since it was his second assault strike the administration had voted for his immediate expulsion. 

“You can’t,” Adam had begged, clutching at the edge of Iverson’s desk. “Commander, please—”

“You  _ know  _ I can’t do anything about it, Adam,” snapped Iverson, looking just as tormented as Adam did. “I know how good he is, I’m not a fool—and I know the kid’s been in a bad way ever since the ship went missing. But it’s an  _ assault  _ charge, Walia, his second one. There’s no other option.”

“There has to be something—that was all Takashi wanted for him, I’m begging you—”

“Unless those scans come back next week and show us the cruiser intact, Shiro’s dead,” said the Commander bluntly. “What do you propose I do? Argue with Sanda’s lot, and swear to them that Kogane won’t lay a hand on anyone again? Shiro had to do that years ago, and see how that turned out. They won’t believe anything now that he’s got a record for fighting, and they definitely won’t believe anything from you. You’re his guardian, for Heaven’s sake.”

Adam sobbed out another protest—he didn’t have a clue what he was saying, by then—and dropped his head into his hands. There was really nothing left, he realized: no legacy of being the first to reach the edge of the solar system, since that had already been shadowed by the proposed  _ pilot error  _ in the Garrison’s official statement to the media, and now not even the chance for Keith to follow in Takashi’s footsteps. It was all his fault, he thought wildly, his fault for pushing Takashi to stay—maybe he would have come around eventually, if Adam had left him alone— _ his _ fault for spending all his time  _ moping,  _ instead of focusing on Keith—

“Cheer up,” Iverson sighed. “I’ve thought of something.”

“What?”

“He can avoid the blacklist, even though he’ll have to leave,” he grumbled. “If you withdraw him now, he won’t be under our jurisdiction. It’ll only be a technicality, but given enough time he might be able to come back and finish his certification eventually. If he can pass the senior exams next year it won’t be an issue, and we’ll be able to figure something out with admin then. But you have to act fast, before the disciplinary committee gets a chance to open his case.”

Ten minutes later Adam found himself standing at the door to the student services building, holding the papers the commander had given him. They were signed and sealed in a crisp white envelope, which was labeled with a sticker that said “Student Withdrawal.”

Letting go of those forms had been torture, he remembers, as if by withdrawing Keith from the Garrison he was signing Takashi’s life away. But eventually the papers were reviewed and submitted, and Keith was removed from the student roster by six o’clock that evening. Adam helped him clean out his class and gym lockers, and a little while after curfew they left the campus and drove back to their whitewashed apartment complex for dinner. 

_ I’m sorry, Takashi,  _ he thought, watching Keith drop his bags on the couch before slamming the door to his bedroom.  _ I failed you.  _

Keith was crying, he realized numbly. Keith who met insults with violence and anger, and never once shed a tear even during those two horrible months Takashi spent in the hospital. . 

_ Both of you.  _

_ * _ __ _ * _ __ _ * _

“Are you mad?” 

Adam jumped away from the stove and turned around, dropping half a tomato on the ground as he put a hand over his heart. Keith was sitting at the kitchen table, still in his orange Garrison uniform and staring straight ahead as if determined to take whatever was coming. He balled up his fists and looked Adam straight in the eye, waiting in silence for his answer. 

“I know I deserve it.”

“I’m not mad at you, Keith,” Adam sighed. 

“You’re disappointed.” Keith somehow managed to look even more distraught than before. “I, I don’t—”

“I’m not disappointed either.”

“Then what?”

“You’re Takashi’s legal ward,” said Adam wryly. “And you hit Officer Ainsley for insulting him. I was going to marry him, remember? What do you think I would have done?”

“Uh...not hit him?”

“Not now, maybe. But when I was seventeen? He would have lost some teeth at least, and those don’t grow back. So no, I’m not mad.”

“What-what about school?”

“Being a fighter pilot isn’t the be-all and end-all, Keith. And I—to be honest, I still don’t know if you really like the coursework or if you just stayed in the program for Takashi.” He frowned. “That’s what I did. But you’re not as much of a pushover as I am.”

“I did like it,” cried Keith. “But I’m never going back there, ever. All those people, Adam—when we got the news, their  _ faces— _ ”

“I know,” Adam muttered. “Believe me, I do. He would have sent word if the dystrophy was getting worse. He wouldn’t have put Matt and Officer Holt at risk for anything.”

“ _ You _ said that’s exactly what he was doing,” said Keith wetly. “Before he left. I heard you.”

“I said a lot of things I shouldn’t have.”

“But you meant it.”

“I did mean that one, yeah.” Adam picked up his tomato and rinsed it off under the tap. “I’m...I’m sorry, Keith. You shouldn’t have had to hear it.”

“He should have stayed.”

To his credit, Adam didn’t falter at that. “Takashi did what he thought he had to do. Just like you did today, though I’m much more in favor of your jaunt than I was of his. Now let’s have dinner and get some sleep. It’s probably only their messaging system that’s the problem, and we’ll know for sure on Friday.”

But when Friday arrived, the probe’s grainy pictures of the  _ Theia-Selene  _ left no doubt that Takashi would not be coming home.

* * *

**Galaxy Garrison Events <** [ **eventsandscheduling@ggarizona.gov** ](mailto:eventsandscheduling@ggarizona.gov) **> (sent by j_dossantos@ggarizona.g… to ** **_staff, students, assoc_alumni_ **

**April 04, 2137, 2:21 P.M. (1 day ago)**

Dear Students, Staff, and Faculty, 

It is with heavy hearts that we confirm the deaths of the crew of the  _ Theia-Selene,  _ Officers of Science Samuel T. Holt and Matthew Laurence Holt and First Flight Officer Takashi Shirogane…

* * *

**_Colleen O’Shaughnessy-Holt_ **

[10:19] Are you coming to the memorial?

[10:21] It’s okay if you don’t want to, honey. I know they’ve been pressing you to make a statement. 

 

**_adam umarzai_ **

[10:23] I’d rather keep Keith away from all of that.

[10:23] and nobody’s stopped asking about the engagement since they sent the notice anyway.

[10:24] do you want to drop Katie off at my apartment? she shouldn’t have to deal with the news crew.

 

**_Colleen O’Shaughnessy-Holt_ **

[10:24] I’ll ask her.

[10:30] No, she wants to go to the service with me. 

[10:31] Do you want me to say anything for Shiro?

 

**_adam umarzai_ **

[10:31] no, there’s nothing.

[10:33] wait, Colleen

[10:33] ah, never mind.

[10:34] I’m always here if you and Katie need anything, okay?

[10:34] Do the two of you want to come over for dinner tonight?

 

**_Colleen O’Shaughnessy-Holt_ **

[10:35] I’ll bring some of Matt’s apple dumplings. 

[10:38] And I know, sweetheart. 

[10:39] We’re here for you, too. 

* * *

**_smoll bean snek_ **

[4:16] You got banned from the Garrison??

[4:16] during the service?????

[4:16] katie what happened

[4:16] pidge

 

**_kitkatkatie_ **

[4:18] (file)  _ kerberos_feed_0320.mp3 _

[4:21] listen to this

[4:22] i hacked into sanda’s account from iverson’s

 

**_smoll bean snek_ **

[4:30] ??????????

[4:31] why????

[4:39] did you tell anyone about this.

 

**_kitkatkatie_ **

[4:40] i’m not an idiot keith ofc i didn’t

[4:41] and we’re not coming over tonight btw, my mom’s texting Adam

 

**_smoll bean snek_ **

[4:41] what are you going to do now?

 

**_kitkatkatie_ **

[4:42] i need to get back into the Garrison.

[4:42] can you help?

 

**_smoll bean snek_ **

[4:44] no

[4:44] but I know someone who can

* * *

**_smoll bean snek_ **

[4:44] you need to help Katie sneak back into the Garrison. 

[4:45] you’re the only engineer we know with enough clearance, please

 

**_adam umarzai_ **

[4:46] dammit Keith what did I say about texting me while I’m cooking

[4:47] i almost dropped a knife on my foot

[4:47] also brb, colleen’s talking to me

[4:47] and come down off the roof right now, you’ll hurt yourself

 

**_smoll bean snek_ **

[4:47] (file) _kerberos_feed_0320.mp3_

 

**_adam umarzai_ **

[4:56] Katie did  _ what?????? _

 

**_smoll bean snek_ **

[4:56] listen to the mp3

[4:56] you’ll understand

 

**_adam umarzai_ **

[4:58] come inside keith

[5:07] ….

[5:08] What the hell is this.

**_*_ ** **** **_*_ ** **** **_*_ **

**_adam umarzai added smoll bean snek and kitkatkatie to the group chat._ **

 

**_adam umarzai_ **

[5:13] oh, God. Colleen’s going to kill me.

[5:13] I’m in.

  
  
  
  
  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> find me on tumblr at @datboicomehere!!


	16. Chapter 16

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Luka arrives.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Brief note: Lieutenant Bradley is Curtis, who appears in this fic as a background character. I refer to him alternatively by Curtis and Bradley as well as by his title. 
> 
> About Adam's last name, just in case anyone is confused: The surname Ahluwalia is often traditionally shortened to Walia for day-to-day use, and since the abbreviated version is simpler to pronounce it's what most people at the Garrison when talking to/about him. When he was a cadet he also went by his mother's last name, Umarzai, which was his screen name in the last chapter. His full name is Adam Umarzai Ahluwalia, and after an administrative error during his first year he was accidentally identified as "Adam Umarzai" on some rosters. 
> 
> About Adam's rank and position: Adam was promoted to Major after joining the first-generation MFE fighter squadron while Voltron was still stuck in the rift, and shortly before he was hooked up to the Atlas Sanda named him Lieutenant General to honor his service. 
> 
> Since the promotion ceremony was private, most of the Garrison staff and students still don't know about his new rank, and the people who do know, like Iverson, still call him Major (except Sanda) since they didn't have time to get used to it.

Only five minutes before Voltron and the MFE fighters are scheduled to leave the Atlas, they find themselves trapped in their hangars.

“Uh,” says Hunk, hailing the bridge through the comms. “Is everyone stuck, or is it just me?”

“I am too,” Keith calls. “Lance, what about you?”

Though it’s really not the moment to be thinking about his little brother’s love life, Shiro rolls his eyes and smiles when Lance confirms that he’s just as stuck as Keith is. “Is there something wrong with your lions?”

“Our lions are fine,” Pidge pipes up. “It’s just the hangars’ outer doors. They won’t open.” From the speaker, Shiro hears her climbing out of Green and running to inspect the airlocks. “Huh. That’s weird.”

“What?” asks Iverson, motioning Bradley to access the video feed from the green lion’s hold. “You’re on camera now, Katherine. What seems to be the problem?”

“There’s a current going through here that shouldn’t be,” she frowns, pointing up to a panel hiding about eight feet of circuitry. “Is there an override on the hangar doors?”

“I only had two control systems put in,” Sam replies. “One from the bridge, and one in the hangar itself in case of emergency. The second one should be off unless you’ve activated it yourself.”

“Well, it’s on,” says Pidge, bemused. “And the switch is still in the off position. Look.”

Curtis zooms in further, and Sam draws back with a furrow between his eyebrows. Then his expression lightens, and he turns to the commander with a look of relief.

“Adam can get rid of it, I think. He can operate most of the ship’s systems at will. Griffin, is it the same in the MFE hangar?”

“It is, Officer Holt. Everything else seems to be in perfect order.”

“All right, then. Hang tight, paladins,” Iverson calls. “We’re sending someone down to talk to Major Walia, and hopefully he’ll be able to let you out. Officer Jang?”

“Yes, sir,” says Seok-jin, jumping off his chair. A second later they hear his footsteps heading away down the corridor, and Shiro dares to relax for the first time since they got near the strange-looking mech. The Atlas might have better firepower than even the most advanced Galra cruisers, but it’s still large and awkwardly shaped—without Voltron and the MFEs the ship would be completely vulnerable to attack by a small, agile adversary.

Just after he sinks back into his seat the bridge tenses up at a yell coming from the hold, and then the sound of Officer Jang’s hurried progress _back_ toward the sixth level.

“The hold’s on lockdown, sir!” yells Seok-jin, pelting back onto the bridge at top speed. “The door wouldn’t accept the override command. I couldn’t get in, and Major Walia sent a message to the bulletin outside saying that _he’s_ the one holding the hangars shut.”

 _“What?”_ Everyone in the room stampedes to look at the communications board by the map, which has one new message in the box devoted to Adam’s vault.

_I have closed off the MFE hangar and the five allotted to the Voltron lions. Please do not attempt to counter the override; the Atlas and I have determined that none of our ships are capable of engaging safely with the foreign vessel. I will handle the interaction myself, by your leave._

_-Lt. Gen. Adam Ahluwalia_

“Should I go and talk to him?” asks Shiro, stepping up beside the commander. “I don’t know what he could possibly be doing, but—”

“It doesn’t matter anyway,” Iverson mutters, staring apprehensively at the video feed as the cruel-looking ship gets closer. “He can see out of every camera on board, so don’t bother.”

“What do you think he’s doing?” whispers Colleen. Lieutenant Bradley pulls up the view from the power hold on his holoscreen, jumping in astonishment as Shiro, Sam, and Iverson all crowd round his shoulders.

“What on earth is _that?_ ” breathes Sam.

The slant-angled image of Adam lying in the vault is a little grainy, for some reason—but his body shows up clearly enough, bathed in a cloud of pale blue light from the siphon pulsing over his heart. It’s never been so bright before, Shiro realizes—but now the soft glow spills over the glass and into the chamber around him, overpowering even the bulbs in the ceiling as Adam’s loose hair seems to turn from brown to silver. His eyes are shut, his long lashes still like they’ve been for the past two years; the only part of Adam that moves is his chest, stirring almost imperceptibly with the ebb and flow of his breath.

And then the siphon bursts into color like rainbows bursting through a storm, filling the hold with a beam of what looks like sunlight so intense that Bradley shields his eyes and switches the display to the feed from the MFE hangars. The Atlas shakes from top to bottom, just as it did the night Shiro and half the Garrison medical staff watched Adam’s heart stop beating—

“Oh,” gasps Colleen, pinching her hand as the mech stops dead in its tracks. “Oh, he’s a _wonder_.”

Shiro puts his palms to his eyes to hide his tears, at that.

After all, there’s never been anything so true _._

*    *    *

Being out of his body is one thing, Adam thinks. After all, the metal of the Atlas is as much a body to him now as his own once was, long ago—but being out of the _Atlas_ is a completely different story. He seems to have brought the Atlas’s consciousness with him, and now the two of them are floating in a kind of grey cocoon, reaching slowly for the end of the ship where the coldness of space begins.

There’s a light out there, he realizes. Like a torch alone and faithful in the darkness, trapped in the heart of the silent Wasp and searching hopelessly for escape. It flickers like a dying candle, and sometimes sinks down so far that it seems to have gone out—but still it always comes back again, blazing up in a peak of gold before retreating again.

A moment later the soft yellow glow falls on him, and latches on like a tired child asking to be carried to bed. Adam stops and drifts there for a while, circling around the frightened point of light until it grows curious enough to drop its guard. He is no threat, after all—he’s never been a threat to anyone, and somehow the wary being in front of him seems to realize it.

 _What does it see in me?_ he asks. _It’s not so scared anymore._

 _A haven,_ the Atlas whispers. _She is lost, and you are the first that has called to her in years. There is no one but you to help, my heart. Something must be done._

With a rush of coolness the barrier around them falls away, leaving his consciousness open and untethered in the void between the Wasp and the Atlas. It’s almost terrifying, Adam thinks—but still his newfound freedom sends a rush of joy through every thread of his being, and when he brushes against the Wasp the little lantern inside it puts out a trembling hand.

“I’m here,” he gasps, feeling its fingers delve through his mind like water running through sand. “I’m here, I’m here—”

And the very next second they’re _falling,_ spiraling down through a veil of thick clouds and crashing back to earth.

*    *    *

When Adam opens his eyes he finds himself lying in a tangle of green and white, flat on his back beneath a clear dark sky. The air is cool and still and sweet, familiar and safe in a way that even the dust of the Garrison never was to him.

He’s in Shindola.

He’s _home._

The sweet-smelling veil of green beneath him is a stretch of strawberry runners, and the bits of white at the corner of his eye are flowers—flowers with pale yellow centers and accompanied by budding berries, and at his feet—

Adam scrambles upright, gasping in shock as the bundle of what seems to be armor groans and does the same. It’s a woman, he realizes, one within a few years of his own age, with long red hair and curved sickles under her eyes. Her ears are tapered to matching points like an elf from a fantasy video game, and though he hasn’t the faintest idea _where_ she came from he knows what she must be, at least—Sam had shown him pictures of Alteans before he went into the Atlas, and after Takashi’s return he saw the Princess and her mustachioed advisor for himself through one of the cameras. She’s staring at him, just as completely thrown by his presence as he was just a second ago by hers, parting her lips in astonishment as Adam takes a step closer.

“Who—”

He tries to finish his question, but she beats him to the punch. Literally.

“Who are you?” she snaps, striking Adam across the face and knocking him back to the ground. He struggles up on his elbows, but she doesn’t give him an inch—instead she forces him back with one armored foot on his chest, crushing the breath from his lungs. “Where is the Lady Honerva? And what have you done with my ship?”

“You mean the Wasp?” he coughs. “It’s still floating around somewhere nearby, as far as I know. And who’s Honerva?”

The foot bears down harder. “ _Lady_ Honerva, you cretin. I can’t believe an Altean wouldn’t know—”

The girl falls silent and stares at him. “What kind of Altean are you, anyway? Where in Lotor’s name are your marks? And what’s wrong with your _ears?_ ”

“I’m _not_ Altean,” he says, amused. “And if you’re planning on suffocating me with your boot, I’m sorry to say it isn’t going to work. We’re in my consciousness, so your body’s still stuck on your ship somewhere. Is there anyone else aboard?”

“Anyone else—you think I couldn’t have powered it alone?” The pointed toe of her shoe creeps nearer to his throat. “Is that it?”

“From what I’ve been told, human quintessence is no match for an Altean’s.” Adam shrugs. “I’m human and powering a ship of my own, so make of that what you will. And also, let me up. I want to stretch my legs.”

She pulls out a knife instead. Adam sighs and lies back again, putting his hands flat on the earth beneath him until a lone strawberry runner springs out of the soil and plucks the blade from her fingers. The girl leaps away from it, startled, and lets out a high-pitched scream when the plants clump together behind her to cushion her fall. She lands beside him and rolls upright like a stuntman from an action film, kicking away the tender leaves until they retreat in offense.

“How did you do that?” she demands, withdrawing as far as she can. “What do you want with me?”

“Leave my strawberries alone!” scolds Adam, patting an injured stem until its bruises disappear. “And _you_ were the one who grabbed onto _me,_ so shouldn’t I be asking you that?”

“I did no such thing,” the Altean glowers. “I was entrusted with the Lady Honerva’s mission, I would never—”

He sobers at that, and folds his arms over his chest.

“Why did you destroy all those planets?”

She falters. “W-what?”

“The quintessence in your ship, it wasn’t just yours. What were you going to do with it?”

“That’s _confidential!_ And I haven’t destroyed any planets, so—”

“But you have.” Adam frowns. “Close to a hundred, and all life-bearing ones. Where else could your Wasp’s quintessence have come from?”

“I _haven’t_ ,” she persists, looking absolutely stricken. “I didn’t, I didn’t—”

Adam sighs. “It wasn’t just planets, even. That ship of yours destroyed whole _solar systems_ by draining the quintessence from their suns.”

He pauses.

“Didn’t you _know?_ ”

“Stop lying to me,” she breathes. “The Lady Honerva warned us, she said people would try to stop us. I’m going to find a way back to my ship, I will—”

“You aren’t going anywhere,” mutters Adam, getting up and dusting himself off. In the distance the bungalow shines from within like it’s holding a star inside it, but somehow he knows he’s going to find it empty. “You’re in my mind, remember? You’ll go where I go, until the Atlas lets us out. Or until you wake up.”

“The Atlas?”

“That’s what my ship is called. I gave it sentience somehow, and now it just does what it wants for the fun of it.” He glances up at the sky, searching for a blot of silver-white gleaming against the darkness. “I think it sent us here.”

“Where is here?” asks the Altean tentatively. “It doesn’t look like anywhere on new Altea or Oriande.”

“It’s where I grew up.” And his voice is his own again, touched with regret for his harshness, because even the thought of this hallowed ground where his family had lived so happily was always enough to gentle him. “Come on.”

She stares at him for a minute longer, looking between his face and the trail of the full moon shining almost over his head. There’s doubt there still, more than Adam can set at ease alone—he doesn’t know half of what happened in space, or who Honerva is, or even what the Altean might have suffered during the war.

His mother told him once that there was no such thing as a clean conflict, no simple fight and resolution between two opposing parties without harm done to innocents whose only crime was age, or youth, or simply being too close to the line of fire, too similar in looks to the enemy. Adam recalls Sam’s stories about Voltron and wonders what destruction Takashi and the rest might have forced upon planets and people who had nothing to do with the war—upon prisoners locked in the holds of downed battleships, young Galrans forced into service by their elders—

Adam holds out his hand.

“What quarrel do you have with Voltron?” he asks, taking a half-step closer.

Her eyes fill up with tears.

“We had an emperor, Lotor,” she mumbles thickly. “Well, not an emperor really. He didn’t rule over us. But back when Zarkon destroyed Altea he rescued all the survivors he could find, and hid us in a pocket of spacetime where his father couldn’t reach us. We stayed there for thousands of decaphoebs, and Lotor watched over us—he didn’t age like we did, since his quintessence was altered when he was a baby somehow. But just after I came of age around thirty phoebs ago, he told us he had allied with Voltron against his father and stopped coming back to maintain the colony. He told us everything was all right, and then we never saw him again.”

“I know that name,” Adam frowns, thinking back to the week he spent in the Garrison hospital just after Sam’s return. Sam and Colleen were talking over his head for the most part, but the name Lotor had definitely cropped up at some point. “What happened to him?”

“They _killed_ him,” she sobs. “They just turned on him one day, chased him into a quintessence rift. And he died there. He was so kind, and they—”

One step nearer, and her hand is clasped in his. Another, and her head falls onto his shoulder.

“What’s your name?”

Adam doesn’t know why the question came to him after _that_ , but it seems important to ask, for some reason. She lifts her face from his collar, looks up into his eyes—and seems to find what she’s searching for, giving Adam her answer with a pale soft hint of a smile.

“Luka.”

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Luka: im gonna cut your neck  
> Adam: ╮(︶︿︶)╭  
> Luka: and also, crush your strawberries  
> Adam: ψ(▼へ▼メ)～→


	17. Chapter 17

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Adam deals with the entity.

After the foreign vessel stops moving, everyone looks at Iverson.

“What?” he asks, lifting an eyebrow. “I don’t―”

“Look,” Colleen interrupts him. “Another message from the hold.”

There’s another stampede to the message board, since everyone had gone back to look out the windows. Shiro ends up squashed between Sam, Seok-jin, and Curtis, craning his neck to see the three lines emblazoned on the soft orange screen.

_Take the Altean ship aboard. Handle it with caution; there is a living pilot in the power chamber behind its chest armor. Adam has confirmed that she is no threat._

The message is from the Atlas, Shiro realizes. Its speech is much brusquer than Adam’s, holding little respect for titles or courtesy―it answers to Adam and Adam alone, and is apparently determined to make its allegiance plain with every word and movement. He recalls only one occasion where the Atlas took interest in someone besides its sleeping pilot, thanking Colleen on Adam’s behalf the night Juliana Castile from emergency saved his life.

For a moment, he wonders what it could have been possibly thanking Colleen for. She hadn’t even been in the room at the time.

“An _Altean_ ship?” asks Curtis, trying to wriggle out from under Seok-jin’s arm. Seok-jin pokes him in the ribs. “I thought the Princess and her advisor were the last of the Alteans. And Romelle, of course. ”

“There were more,” says Shiro absently. “There was an off-planet colony, established just after Altea fell. That’s where Romelle is from.”

“Did I hear that right, Shiro?” Allura demands through the comms. “There’s an Altean in that vessel?”

“That’s what the Atlas says, Princess,” calls Iverson. “Paladins, get out there and tow that thing into the empty cargo hold in section Q. Can you leave the hangars now?”

“We can,” Pidge confirms. “The override’s been canceled.”

“Permission to depart?”

“Granted, Officer Kogane. MFEs, follow and remain alert in case of a conflict.”

“Yes, sir.”

But the operation goes off without a hitch, and scarcely half an hour later most of the crew is gathered in the cargo hold’s viewing bay to watch as Hunk and Allura drag the mech through the doors. After the airlock closes behind Lance, Sam and Colleen rush down in the elevator, running across the empty floor to stand on the mech’s broad chest. They get to work with a pair of crowbars and a saw that Sam designed after Shiro’s old Galra prosthesis, cutting through the armor of the breastplate until they’ve made an opening big enough to accommodate Colleen’s biorhythm sensor.

“What was it that Adam called it?” wonders Iverson, observing them as they sound out the robot’s torso one square foot at a time. “A wasp?”

“It does look like one,” says Shiro wryly. “Look at its waist. I can see Colleen raging over the design impracticality from here.”

“It’s a pivot point,” Pidge explains, popping up behind them. The rest of the paladins bring up the rear, followed an instant later by the four MFE pilots. “Like our waists are. The slimness makes it less of a target.”

“That was fast,” comments Seok-jin. In the hold, an army of maintenance personnel are poking at the ship’s ugly head. “How do you guys even do that?”

“Practice,” Lance sighs. “Back when we lived in the castle, I’d be fast asleep in my bed at seven forty-five and ready for battle in Blue by seven forty-seven.”

“Oh, look!” exclaims Leifsdottir. Down below, the maintenance crew has cut through the Wasp’s thin neck and unearthed the bottom of a purple crystal seemingly lodged in its head. “Could we use that to power the Atlas, instead of Major Walia?”

“Goodness, no.” Allura shudders. “Balmeran crystals only turn purple after having their quintessence corrupted. It would render the Atlas useless, or turn it into something like the ship down there.”

“Yeah, when―” Lance presses his nose to the glass, dragging Keith along to stand beside him. “They’ve found her.”

Shiro blinks and follows, squinting over the top of Lance’s head as Pidge climbs up his back to see over Iverson’s. Sure enough, Sam and Colleen have traced out a rectangle about six and a half feet long and three feet across―about the right size for a coffin, he thinks, at least for a woman’s. Sam briefly vanishes behind a shower of sparks as a burly technician saws through the marked path, and a second later Hunk claps his hands over his ears at the deafening crash as the piece of warped metal falls aside.

There _is_ an Altean inside, encased in a glass-fronted capsule with a pair of purple siphons glinting above her forehead. Shiro cringes at the sight of them; they’re nothing like the round blue-white one anchored over Adam’s heart, which brightens and fades with his pulse and dims like a bedside nightlight whenever he falls asleep. There’s something benign about Adam’s siphon, almost as if it knows and adores the faithful spirit it clings to...but the triangular implants set just beneath the Altean’s hairline care nothing for the body they drink from, though Shiro can’t tell why he thinks so.

Colleen taps the glass over her face, watching carefully for a response or a change in her breathing―but the Altean does not move, and as the Holts scramble down to the floor a pair of burly pilots offer to carry the pod to the medical wing. Lance and Keith watch them disappear through the second airlock to the corridor outside, leaving foggy nose-prints on the window until Kinkade clucks his tongue and pulls them away.

“There’s nothing more to see here, cadets,” scolds Iverson, pointing the younger officers to the door. “We’ve finished what we came for, and now we’re going home. Dismissed.”

“Yes, Commander.” Pidge yawns and slips off Shiro’s back, attaching herself to Lance’s shoulders instead. “Good night.”

Over the next five minutes the viewing bay empties completely; Iverson and Bradley leave right after the paladins, and then Seok-jin makes off for the canteen with Veronica, apparently too flustered by the half-hour he spent in Curtis’s company to even think about going back to the bridge with him. Shiro trudges out last, shutting the bay door behind him and turning toward the elevator that leads to the ship’s bottom level.

It hadn’t escaped his notice that Adam had been unable to answer after locking the hangars.

He doesn’t dare wonder why.

*    *    *

_“The darkness you carry,” said Adam. “What is it?”_

_He stood with his back to the rising sun, glinting in the light like an idol made of bronze―and when he spoke the weight left Luka’s heart, for somehow he had convinced her that she would be taken care of―that Adam, born of a weaker race and confined for two years in the hold of a ship though he was, had both the strength and the knowledge to stand between her and the universe. She drew up her knees to her chest and watched him water his flowerpots, thinking back to the week she spent with the Empress the month before her Komar ship was launched―back to the ache in her head it left her with, the heaviness of her tongue when she tried to ask Tavo and Merla if they felt the same, the three young Alteans who entered Honerva’s training chamber and never came back out of it._

_“She did something,” Luka replied dimly. “I don’t remember what. I went to her laboratory with four of my friends, and when I came out six movements later it felt like I’d only been there an hour.”_

_“I can take it from you, I think,” he answered, setting a warm hand on her arm. “Come here.”_

_He lifted her out of the chair, laid the blanket aside―and raised her hands to his chest, setting them flat over his heart as if he were taking a blessing. To her astonishment she felt his pulse beneath her fingers, fluttering like a swallow’s wings as he pressed her palms closer still._

_“I can feel it beating,” she whispered. “How?”_

_“It’s all that I am.” He seemed surprised at his words, as if he hadn’t meant to say them. “All that I have been, or ever will be. It would’ve been stranger if you couldn’t.”_

_Adam’s fingers clenched over hers, and she gasped at the fire in her lungs as he set his jaw and_ pulled _, drawing something purple and black out from between her ribs―something that fought every inch of the way, clinging to her bones and then to her flesh until Adam twisted his wrist and broke it away completely._

_“Here,” he whispered, tapping his own thin chest. The body hung trembling between them, torn halfway between her shoulders and his as he lifted a long-fingered hand._

_“This is what you want, so take it. Leave her, and come to me.”_

_It did as he said, plunging from its place in front of Luka’s nose and into Adam’s heart, tearing a cry of torment from his lips as his legs went out from under him. She caught him as he dropped, lowering him gently to the floor where he thrashed like a beast in a fit―_

_“I’ll be all right,” he choked, somehow finding the will to comfort her even in the depths of his agony. “The Atlas and I will get rid of it, I promise. It can’t hurt you now, Luka―”_

_The scream that followed chilled her blood to ice, and she covered her ears in anguish at the pain of it. Beside her Adam was twitching as if he had been shocked, and when he cried out again she shut her eyes and buried her face in her arms._

_“It’s going to be fine,” she sobbed, finding the vein in his throat to feel for his pulse. “You’re going to be fine.”_

_But he gave her neither speech nor sound in reply, and when she dared to look up she found herself alone with nothing but a patch of warm tile to mark the spot where Adam had lain._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Am I shipping Curtis and Seok-jin?  
> Yes, yes I am.


	18. Chapter 18

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Shiro and the Atlas have a bonding moment.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i don't like this chapter at all but what can you do amirite

After the Altean pilot is carried away to the medical wing, Shiro spends the next two hours sitting with Adam. It’s a routine he just fell into, after the launch; he finishes whatever small tasks he receives in the morning, trains a little in the gym with Keith and Kinkade, makes sure the Garrison trio isn’t blowing anything up, and then sits alone in the power hold until Iverson arrives to take his place.

His conversations with Adam are one-sided, for the most part. Adam usually conserves his strength to communicate with the bridge and control room, since he can’t manage much more than forty consecutive minutes of speech a day; but he’ll let Shiro know he’s listening every so often by a word or two on his monitor, or even the odd full sentence now and then.

Today, however, there is nothing. The screen connected to the Morse interpreter remains stubbornly inactive, signaling that Adam is too severely exhausted to listen, let alone speak—but Shiro keeps talking anyway, telling him about the crystal Sam and Colleen uncovered in the mech’s metal skull and the strange clear pod in its torso that housed the Altean pilot. He shudders at the thought of what it must have been like for her, trapped in a robeast for months on end without air or sunlight or company—of what it must feel like for _Adam_ to lie here day after day, alone—

 _He can’t hear you,_ snaps the Atlas at last, somehow managing to seem completely exasperated. _Stop talking so much. It’s annoying._

“Oh,” Shiro sighs. “It’s you.”

_You don’t have to sound so disappointed._

“I saw the screen turn on, and I thought he’d woken up,” says Shiro dully. “And then I got you instead. Of course I’m disappointed.”

He pauses.

“Is he—okay?”

 _Tired from fighting with the Wasp, and with the Altean woman._ The screen blinks white for a moment before settling back to orange. _But he will recover, as he always does. You need not worry._

“With the Altean?” Shiro glances up. “Why?”

_She did not come so easily, Takashi. My pilot had to draw her out, and then she decided to beat him for it._

“ _Beat_ him?”

_She thought hitting him across the face would bring her back to her ship. It didn’t, of course, but it was funny to watch her try._

Shiro tries to visualize it and fails. He can’t even imagine someone _thinking_ about hitting Adam, let alone actually doing it; in his childhood, Adam had been soft-hearted to the point of helplessness during schoolyard fights, fearing the prospect of hurting his tormentors more than he feared being injured himself.

“...Did he hit her back?” he asks, unsure what he wants the answer to be.

 _Of course not. He couldn’t land a punch to save his life, that one._ The screen flashes silver again, as if in amusement. _But you know that, of course._

He laughs. “Keith tried to wrestle him once when he was around fifteen. He kept on yelling at Adam to stop going easy on him, but now that I think about it Adam was practically paralyzed. He couldn’t even move, and Keith ended up giving him a black eye because he wouldn’t raise a hand to block him.”

 _I remember that_ , says the ship. _But he was always brave for you, wasn’t he?_

“Always.” Shiro rests his cheek against the viewing panel, sighing as Adam’s lips remain resolutely still. “Someone tried to break into our apartment with a cleaver a year or two before Kerberos, and Adam dealt with him even before I had time to get out of bed. He took my gun out of the closet and opened the blinds so the guy could see him load it, and two seconds later he was gone.”

Something occurs to him then, and he turns away from Adam’s vault to look up at the camera.

“Why are you talking to me, anyway? I thought you hated me.”

 _I could never hate anything my Pilot loved,_ the Atlas replies. _And his memories are clearer to me now than they were before the launch. I thought he came to me because you had broken his heart, but now I know that wasn’t..._

It pauses.

 _Humans are more complicated than I had thought,_ it confesses. _Love and happiness and pain go together, it seems, and cannot be separated. The two of you were separated by circumstance, nor cruelty, and unless I am greatly mistaken you love him more dearly now than you did in the beginning._

“It’s difficult enough for people to understand each other, let alone sentient warships,” shrugs Shiro, warming from head to toe at the Atlas’s newfound acceptance of him. “And you’re only two years old. Of course it was hard.”

 _I may not dislike you, but I would still not test my grace, if I were you,_ it warns. _Age is no measure of wisdom, and I learn more with every passing day. Surely you know that._

“Okay, okay,” he laughs. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it.”

There’s silence for a little while, a comfortable, companionable silence, as if he and the Atlas have reached some kind of understanding after being at odds for weeks. Shiro sits with his elbows on the vault’s clear glass, watching as the ship busies itself with igniting and dimming the bulbs over Adam’s face, as if wondering what lighting makes him look most lovely. It settles on a pale kind of red, which brings back the burnt-copper warmth of his skin and deepens the color of his lips and hair until Shiro finds himself staring at the man who spent two months sleeping at the foot of his hospital bed and seven years lying beside him at night, the boy who sneaked down to the kitchens after curfew to cook the dishes Shiro’s mother used to make, after he admitted how much he missed her—the gangling eighteen-year-old who welcomed Keith with open arms just because Shiro had wanted him, the man he had wanted to _marry_ , the man he still loved with every fiber of his being—

“I miss him,” he whispers. “So much. I keep on thinking he’ll just wake up one day, and coming back here night after night so I can forget that he won’t get up in the morning. ”

A teardrop lands on the glass over Adam’s cheek, and Shiro stifles a sob.

“I’m not asking you to let him go, though. Don’t worry. I know he has to stay.”

 _Takashi, dearheart,_ soothes the Atlas, drawing him back to look at the screen with a spark of static through his hand. _You have your duty, and he has his. It is no shame to wish that they were over, or for someone else to carry the burden for you. But the burden will leave you sometime, just as it will leave him, and then there will be nothing to keep you both from happiness._

“Dearheart?” he mumbles, wiping his eyes. “Why—”

 _You should hear how Adam talks about you,_ says the ship wickedly. Somewhere in the back of his mind, Shiro can almost picture a Cheshire-cat kind of grin. _It’s a sign of love in your country, isn’t it—to call the ones near to you by their given names? But his tongue holds words of tenderness exceedingly dear, and after all this time he still shies away from calling you only Takashi, even to me. It’s always Takashi, my love, or Takashi, my sun and stars. Takashi, my heart’s delight, Takashi my beloved, Takashi the ravisher of hearts. Takashi, my life’s enchanter. Takashi born of moonlight, Takashi fair as the stars—_

“Stop,” chokes Shiro. He gapes wide-eyed at Adam’s still face and blushes from cheek to cheek, trembling at the thought that the man asleep before him still thinks of him as he did when they were eighteen and walking hand-in-hand across lonely beaches all up and down the coast. “I, I can’t—”

_Takashi, jaan-e-janaana._

“ _Oh,_ Adam _—”_

_You’re still the love of his life. And you will be, until he draws his last breath, and after. There was never anyone else, in all the years you were parted. He considered himself married to you, and when he thought you were gone..._

“You’re making me cry,” he sobs. “I—”

He leans down over the vault, which finally, _finally_ opens without hesitation, as if either the ship or Adam himself is sure of his love at last—permitting him to whisper his promises into Adam’s soft hands, his forehead, the coin-shaped scar on his wrist.

“We’re going to be happy, sweetheart. The _second_ this is over, I’m going to make it up to you. I swear it, with everything I have.”


	19. Chapter 19

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which the question of the breakup is addressed, discussed, and dismissed.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This (relatively) quick update is dedicated to the sweet reader who had to go to the dentist lately ♡＼(￣▽￣)／♡ hope you feel better ASAP! ♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡

_I’m not angry._

Adam chopped a tomato into halves and then into quarters before throwing all four pieces into a bowl.

_I’m_ not _angry._

What good was there in being angry, after all? He and Takashi had fought. He spent a night sitting on the cliff near Keith’s old shack and crying his eyes out in the rain. He came home, took off his wet clothes, and dropped into bed next to his fiance for a few hours of sleep before Takashi left with Keith in the morning. Then he sat down to organize his thoughts into a letter before setting off for work with Takashi’s bento and Keith’s lunchbox.

All three of them came home at four. Takashi had finished reading the letter by then, and gave no indication of it except a whispered _“I’m sorry,”_ as he walked out of the apartment an hour later to finish his first set of training hours for Kerberos, leaving Adam behind in the living room with a frozen-looking Keith.

_Damn it. I’m angry._

“Keith!” he shouted, sticking his head around the divider that separated the kitchen from the living room. “Are you busy?”

“Uh.” Keith edged out of his bedroom on tiptoe. “Not...really? Do you need something?”

“Yes, I do,” said Adam, pointing to the bar counter with his knife. “Sit there. I need to rant.”

Keith’s face went pale. “Um. Okay.” He hopped up onto one of the high leather stools and sat with his hands folded in his lap, watching with wide eyes as Adam stomped back and forth between his chopping board and the stove. “Are you, you know, okay?”

“I’m as okay as I can be with the love of my life about to yeet himself to Pluto for no good reason,” said Adam wryly. “Now, tell me the truth. What do you think about Takashi going to Kerberos?”

“I think he shouldn’t, if it’s not safe, but—but he’s worked so hard, and he’s the best pilot that’s ever been! There’s no one else that can fly that mission, and he’ll never get another chance, so shouldn’t he go now? That’s what Matt’s dad said, right?”

“We’re going to take that whole statement apart logically, piece by piece,” muttered Adam, pulling a bottle of cooking oil out of the cupboard. “Now, where exactly did you hear that Takashi’s the best pilot that’s ever been?”

“Well. Here.” Keith wrung his hands. “Everyone says so. I think even my sixth-grade teacher did when she first introduced him that one time.”

“Correction, _baba_. She said that he was the youngest pilot to lead a mission to space. Now, what does that tell you about how he compares to the rest of the pilots who graduated with us?”

“That he’s the best.”

“Right. Now, there are approximately five hundred and seventy certified Garrison graduates in the space program, and that’s over just the past ten years. But there are pilots in their sixties still up-to-date with the standard protocols and cleared for active duty, who’ve been practicing longer than Takashi’s been alive. That Indonesian professor from Texas, Kemala Suparmanputri—she’s led fifteen missions to Saturn’s moons over the last twenty years, and she’s a long way from retiring.”

“I don’t understand,” Keith confessed. “What are you trying to say?”

“I’m _saying_ Takashi’s excellence in comparison to pilots our age doesn’t say anything about how good he is compared to people who’ve been handling the outer missions from the beginning,” sighed Adam. “It was time for a new thrill, I guess. The space program’s gone trite. Fewer kids are signing up for the fighter program, because most of them come wanting to go into space eventually. Takashi was pitched as a potential pilot to the funding committee in Florida, and he’s the one behind the recruitment surge. Young, good-looking, good personality. Getting behind him was probably a lot easier than sending Suparmanputri a few planets further would’ve been.”

“So you’re saying Shiro’s not good enough to be on that mission? I—”

“Hush, _beta._ I’m not saying he isn’t good enough. God knows he is, and I wish he wasn’t. I’m saying that there’s more behind getting a ship from here to the edge of a solar system than talent, that’s all. There’s funding, which relies on public opinion, and manpower. The _Theia-Selene_ didn’t come from nowhere; hundreds of mechanics and engineers spent the last three years building it. And as for _scientific advancement,_ my foot. The Garrison couldn’t care less about Sam’s research—give it two more years and we’ll have a self-piloted vessel capable of doing extraction work on its own, and if people would just remember that—”

He decapitated two snappers with a single quick stroke, sending a trickle of half-congealed blood pouring into the sink. Keith winced.

“I know you don’t want him to go,” he ventured, putting a small soft hand on Adam’s shoulder. “And I know he said some really rough things last night. I would have punched him if he said that to me, just like I punched James Griffin back in first year. My dad died a lot like your mom did, so I get it. But even if someone else _could_ lead the mission, it’s Shiro who got the spot, so—”

“I told him if he went, we were over.”

Keith’s eyes grew wide with shock, and his lips started to tremble. “You what? But, but he proposed, and you said yes—”

Adam turned away to hide the tears welling up on his lashes. “Yeah, I did.”

“Wait a second.”

“What?”

“You’re just saying that.”

“No, I’m not,” Adam protested. “You can look in that envelope over there, if you don’t believe me—”

“Takashi, my love,” recited Keith. “It may be worn to death now, to say that one would perish for the object of his or her affections. You, knowing me, know that I dislike that term immensely, for you have never been an object of any kind, to me or to anyone else. Thus, having assured you that I would die for you if the need ever arose (not as a promise of love, only as a promise that my body would decide it for me if my mind happened to falter in the moment) I swear as I would give an oath to my Lord that I will follow wherever you choose to roam, accept the words from your lips as my only law and—”

“Stop!” shrieked Adam, finally regaining the powers of speech. “What the—you little monkey, where did you even find that? And for that matter, how could you even read it? It was in Hindi!”

“You have really nice handwriting. And scanning translators exist.” Keith rolled his eyes. “Also, you’re really cheesy. Did you even show this to him?”

“No, I didn’t. And who exactly gave you the right to go snooping under my bed, anyway—oh, no, don’t go _on,_ Keith—”

“—and spend whatever days are granted me in humble devotion to you, my dearest heart. Having seen and loved you, the sun falls dark in my eyes where once—”

“I will literally pay you to stop talking right now _—oh my God, why do you have this memorized—_ ”

“How did the rest go? Oh, yeah. ‘I cannot ask you to leave the abode where you dwell, out among the stars and wholly beyond my reach, for you are only a man and cannot live in both at once. Instead I shall take the portion of your nights allotted for mine, and cherish you then as well as I am able.’ Should I keep going?”

Adam eyed him shrewdly. “You don’t remember the rest, do you?”

“...No.”

“Small mercies, I guess.”

“That’s not the point, Adam!” Keith threw up his hands. “Could you even leave him if you _tried?_ ”

He felt himself shake from head to foot, felt the knife slip from his fingers and clatter onto the floor an inch from his feet, felt his legs go out from under him as he slid down the oven door and collapsed onto the linoleum.

After all, that was the question, wasn’t it?

Adam thought wildly of his fourteen-year-old self waking up after a party with Takashi’s head on his shoulder, and wondered if he had a choice even then. He thought of his father walking the fields alone by night, always with his face turned north, with one hand stirring restlessly in longing for the wife who slept in his arms for no more than three or four months out of the year and was regardless present in his every waking moment, so much so that he left his children without regret to follow her into her grave. He thought of the six months Takashi spent away on a mission to the asteroid belt, of the bed that felt so cold in his absence that Adam went to sleep outside on the sofa instead, and his own resolve to be Takashi’s partner and helpmate in all things, from the running of their modest household to looking after Keith and taking care of Takashi himself whenever the time came.

That hadn’t changed, he realized. Nor would it, for as long as he lived.

“Oh, my God,” whispered Keith, while Adam sat dazed on the floor. “ _Leave_ him? Don’t make me laugh. You don’t even take your ring off to cook, or in the shower. You wrote him all those courtly love letters while he was off on Ceres because you missed him so much and then hid them under the bed because you were too shy to show him. You’re already _married_ to him, for Heaven’s sake.”

“Is it that obvious?” Adam croaked. “He has me, body and soul, and he’ll have me till the day I die. I couldn’t walk out on Takashi any more than I could walk out on myself. But I had to _try._ I had to at least _pretend_ I didn’t belong to him, or it would have driven me mad to watch him go. He’s got my life in his hands, _beta._ And he doesn’t really want it. So, so I thought it would be easier to get him to leave _me_ , so I could—”

“So you could what? Move on to someone else?”

“Don’t know that there is such a thing as moving on from him,” said Adam, drawing up his knees as Keith leaned over to turn off the stove. “He’s spoiled me for the rest of humanity, I think. He took me and made me his before romance was even in the picture, so I don’t…”

Keith lifted an eyebrow.

“It be like that sometimes,” he finished lamely, cracking a grin as Keith burst into laughter.

“And sometimes like that it be,” snorted Keith, without missing a beat. “Come on, _aniki._ Let’s finish dinner. I’ll yell at Shiro for you when he gets home.”

“Didn’t you just yell at him yesterday?”

“I can do it again.” Keith reached down and hauled Adam up to his feet, grasping his long-fingered hands with a little more gentleness than Adam was used to. “And those fish look really sad. Just put them out of their misery and cook them already.”

“They don’t have heads, Keith. They can’t feel anything.”

“ _You_ don’t have a head, and you feel things just fine.”

“...I am offended, but also grudgingly impressed.”

“Thanks. Pidge’s been teaching me.”

“Oh _God_ , Katie.”

*    *    *

When Takashi came home he found them flying between the stove and the table, setting out cutlery and serving dishes while trading stories about their families. Keith was talking about a distant aunt who had died some years before his father, and Adam rejoined with a memory or two from his childhood with his cousin Shanti.

“ _Tadaima,"_ he said, hanging up his umbrella and gaping like the poor butchered snappers when Adam came running out of the kitchen to greet him. “Adam, sweetheart, what—”

“ _Okaerinasai,_ Takashi _._ ” Adam’s lips brushed his forehead like a pair of fallen petals, somehow both resigned and hopeful at once. “Go get your wet things off, love. Dinner’s ready.”

Takashi obeyed without a word, and over supper his eyes kept on going from Adam to Keith in utter confusion at their high spirits and the melancholy behind them. Keith finished eating first and went to bed early, wishing them both goodnight before vanishing behind his door and leaving them alone at the table.

“I’ll get the dishes,” said Takashi, putting a tentative hand over Adam’s. “Is that okay?”

“You don’t need to ask, _jaan-e-jaan._ Come to bed when you’re done. I’ll wait up.”

Adam kissed the tip of Takashi’s nose and picked his way over Keith’s fallen coat and school jacket to his own room, where he discarded his starched instructor’s uniform for a plain white shirt and checked pants.

“It’s just a bed,” he muttered, after staring at it for a few tense minutes. “And one you’ve slept in since you were eighteen. You’ve cried it in it before, Umarzai. Get a grip.”

But before last night he had never once lain here and wept because of the man sleeping next to him, and so when Takashi finished washing up and followed him inside he found Adam still wringing his hands and scowling at the patterned quilt.

“...What did the bed do to you, love?” he asked, wrapping his arms around his fiance’s waist. The touch was a little more halting than usual, but it was _there,_ so Adam dropped his head back onto Takashi’s shoulder and felt his spine relax at the soft relieved breath that drifted past his cheek.

“That quilt is ugly.”

“Isn’t that the one your aunt sent last Christmas, though?”

Adam blinked. So it was. “Oh.”

“Come on, _janu._ Let’s go to sleep.”

Takashi slid in first, since his spot was against the wall. Adam lay down after him with a sigh, folding his hands on his stomach and staring up at the ceiling until Takashi shifted onto his side and wound their legs together.

“You didn’t mean it, did you?” he whispered. “That you’d leave if I went to Kerberos?”

“I meant it,” murmured Adam. “I meant every word.”

“Adam, I’m _sorry._ ” Takashi’s voice was trembling. “I—I know I crossed the line, yesterday. I didn’t think. _Baby,_ please—”

“What are you asking me to do?” said Adam tiredly. “If—”

“Not to be sad because of me.” He was crying now, sobbing quietly into Adam’s neck. “I’m not asking you to stay, because I know you won’t leave. But I had to watch you walk out of the house last night because I hurt you, and it was the worst feeling in the world. You didn’t even have a jacket, or an umbrella. You wouldn’t pick up my calls. I even called Matt to see if you’d gone to his place, and when I found out you weren’t there I felt like I was dying. I took the car and searched the whole neighborhood, and I still couldn’t find you. I’m so sorry, love. I’m so sorry.”

“You went out in that storm?” Adam hissed. He drew Takashi close to his chest, tucking the top of his head under his chin. “Takashi, what the heck? You could’ve gotten sick, or skidded on the road and—”

“Why wouldn’t I have gone?” sniffled Takashi. “You were out there all alone, and it was my fault.”

“It was more mine, I think. Oh, Takashi, darling, don’t cry, don’t cry—”

“How can I not?” he wailed. “I’m breaking your heart, and you won’t even leave me.”

“Then _stay,_ ” gasped Adam. “Don’t _go_.”

But Takashi’s resolve had long since been proven stronger than diamond, and when Adam finally fell asleep on his shoulder he knew without doubt that Kerberos would come, and that when the _Theia-Selene_ returned—if, by God’s grace, it did—he himself would be there waiting with arms wide open to welcome Takashi home.

*    *    *

The next day was a Saturday, so when the first soft notes of Takashi’s alarm filtered through the bedroom Adam threw out his hand and turned it off before his fiance could hear it. Then he tried to get out of bed, which was more easily said than done; Takashi was lying on his chest again, and it took a good ten minutes for Adam to slide out from under him and make his way to the shower.

After his bath he put on his shorts and an unstitched white _dhoti_ over them, as he usually did whenever he got up early enough to conduct his prayers alone. He lit a small flame before the four little idols and sat cross-legged in front of the altar with his hands folded, suddenly ashamed for having come there to pray that Takashi would change his mind; the shade of impending death hung over his every waking hour, so of course he took the Kerberos mission with both hands and clung like a drowning man in a storm—

“Oh,” whispered Adam.

He bowed his head and began.

_“On the absolute reality and its planes,_

_On that finest spiritual light,_

_We meditate, as remover of obstacles_

_That it may inspire and enlighten us.”_

  _“Suno na,”_ he murmured. “In all your might you are still the kindest of us all, the most righteous, the gentlest, so _please—_ I can’t watch him suffer like this. It’s not his fault. He worked so hard, he— _please, heal him._ I’ll give you anything. Take anything you like. I’m living only for him, anyway. There’s nothing I wouldn’t give up for his sake.”

_Are you certain, my son?_

He blinked. The voice in the back of his mind had been his mother’s, he realized.

“I must be going mad.” Adam closed his eyes. “If one of us has been marked for death, take me in exchange, I pray you. Give me his ruin in agony, if it pleases you, but give your grace to him. I have done nothing to deserve what you have given me, but _maa,_ he—”

The flame went out.

_Then so it shall be done._


	20. Chapter 20

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Adam meets a commander, but not the right one.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> *rolls in 4 weeks late with coffee*
> 
> sup y'all
> 
> *skates away*

When Adam came to he found himself alone, stranded beneath a veil of white fog with the parasite he had pulled out of Luka’s chest drifting silently beside him. It seemed to have been waiting for him to awaken, bobbing up and down like a curious purple jellyfish as he groaned and pushed himself upright.

“This is really starting to annoy me.”

The strange being in front of him said nothing in reply, which was what Adam had been expecting; but it did seem to be listening, so he gritted his teeth and went on, voice mounting higher by the second as he looked around for the weathered porch he had been standing on only a few minutes earlier.

“First I get hit with a wave of dark quintessence―which hurt like all _hell,_ let me tell you―and then I get thrown out of my body, out of the _Atlas,_ and into some kind of weird mindscape thing with a girl who punches first and asks questions later. And _then_ it turns out she has some kind of weird entity in her chest, which _I_ have to get rid of because of _reasons,_ and then I get thrown out of my house _._ I was just getting used to being back there, so why couldn’t the _powers that be_ just have left me alone for _once_ in my life _?_ I just want some peace and quiet, honestly. I’m only―look, I don’t even know how old I am―twenty-eight maybe? What month is it? But I’m pretty sure the Atlas said I haven’t aged since getting into the vault, so maybe I’m still twenty-six?

“I’m twenty-six years old, and I’ve already nursed the love of my life through four years of PND, raised a child who ran off into the desert with my gun and all my good cooking knives the second he turned eighteen, _mourned_ the love of my life after he ran off into space and got himself _kidnapped by aliens,_ mourned my kind-of kid after he ran off in a mecha lion and took three more kids with him, mourned all three of my sisters _,_ watched my best friend’s dad come back from the dead, got myself knocked out and used as a battery for a _really_ snarky battleship, spent two years in a coma, and watched my fiance come back from _God_ knows where with four more lions and half of his damn _arm_ missing―”

Adam turned around and glared at the hovering entity. “I’ll bite your ears off if you mess with me now. I swear I’ll do it.”

His silent companion had grown to match his own height when he was whisked away from Luka, taking on a vaguely human shape with a bulbous head and torso, and now that he was facing it directly Adam felt its confusion almost as keenly as he sensed its wrath. It knew only two things, he realized: its own self and all the rest of the universe, and to its feeble mind the latter’s existence brought only torment to its own. But above all it sought Luka, to sway the Wasp back to its grim design and strip the poor girl of her life if she thwarted its maker’s intentions―

“Who is your maker?” he murmured. His hands went numb where the entity had touched him, shrinking like a day-old cadaver’s before filling out again when he pulled his arms away. But despite the flash of unease that rose for a second in its face the creature did not seem to know, so fell silent for a moment before trying again.

“Where did you come from?”

Silence.

“What are you, even?”

“Nonbeing,” whispered the Atlas, materializing beside him like a ghost in silver and white. “It counters things, I think. Cancels them out. It was surrounded by a barrier and placed in the Altean’s heart, so that it would be close at hand if she betrayed its creator.”

“You mean its life would have snuffed hers out, when the barrier was broken.” A deathly chill stole through Adam’s wrist as the entity’s fingers encircled it, raising black veins on his skin that faded only slightly when he shook it loose. “And placed there? By whom?”

“She was sent to avenge a death, or so she said. Perhaps the creature was made by the one who sent her, the half-Altean’s mother.”

“What are we going to do with it?”

“I can’t kill it,” said the ship, squinting at the entity. “That power is beyond me. It knows but one means of death, and that is to take life in exchange.”

“So if we’re going to destroy it we’ll need to let it kill me?” croaked Adam, swallowing as the bruise-colored fingertips left spots of dead flesh on his arm. “I can’t, you know that. Takashi still needs me, the Atlas―”

“I don’t think it can do anything to your soul, at least,” the Atlas frowned, pointing to where the entity had settled at Adam’s feet and aged them until they could have belonged to a man about twice his age. “But your body is only a body, dearheart, and has no such defense for these things.”

“I felt it when we got near the Wasp,” mused Adam. “You’re probably right. I’ll just deal with it now, then.”

He grasped the entity’s shoulder and watched it sink into his palm, collapsing into a single spot of sickly-looking ooze before trembling and vanishing in a cloud of bright smoke that smelled like half-burned sulfur. The blood-curdling chill of its presence went out of Adam’s heart scarcely a minute later, and in his elation he noticed nothing at all as his knuckles began to ache, nothing at all as his fingernails cracked and turned grey―nothing when a trail of black welts blazed its way down his forearm, stopping four inches away from his elbow as if something had forced it back.

“You’ll have that for the rest of your life, you know,” said the Atlas darkly, taking his hand and leading him out of the gloom. The green fields of Shindola were glinting like emeralds before them, as if they had been only a step away all this time, and despite himself Adam’s memory of the last ten minutes or so seemed to have withered away entirely. He no longer remembered where they were, or what they were doing there―only that there was someone waiting in the little grey house, someone he had been waiting all his life to see-

“You won’t heal from it, ever.”

But somehow he did not hear the sentence, or else he forgot it as soon as he did, and when he awoke two hours later in a wide sweet-smelling bed with three kind faces around him he cried out and burst into tears.

*    *    *

In his childhood, Adam had often listened at doors.

Not due to any mischievous intent (or at least not _often,_ he assured his father) but simply because he was the youngest of the family, save his little cousin Shanti. Nobody told him anything except for his sister Mallika, and after she and Padma went off to university Adam found himself alone without a soul to talk to but his grieving father, who seemed half-dead himself after receiving the news of Yasmeen’s last mission in the north. In the following months Ashim neither ate nor slept unless his own father commanded him to, and scarcely spoke at all until his wife’s old commander called one morning in September to ask if he could pay the Ahluwalias a visit.

Adam helped his father tidy the house after breakfast, dusting the windows and tying back the curtains to let in the wind while Shanti cleaned their grandmother’s tea service and found a few packages of sweet biscuits in the cupboard. They spent the rest of the day weeding in the garden and looking down the lane for General Khondakar’s sleek black Vectra, which had often haunted their nightmares as the herald of Yasmeen’s passing.

When it arrived that evening Shanti’s mother came out of the kitchen and sent them to bed, bringing out a shawl to keep the chill from her brother’s shoulders as the General climbed out of the car and went to sit by Ashim on the porch. Adam slipped out of his room the second their backs were turned, hiding in the shadows behind the couch as Khondakar lit a cigar and reached for the plate of peach biscuits.

“Padma and Chandra called this morning,” said his father, looking dimly over the fields to the cowshed at the edge of the pasture. “They’re enlisting in the Yudh Abhyas program with Rumi. I tried to call them home, but they wouldn’t listen.”

Adam nearly squeaked in astonishment at the sound of his voice, which was closer to its old self than it had been for months. Beside him the General had frozen to his seat, blinking like a startled bird until a mongoose screamed nearby and startled him out of his reverie.

_“Already?”_

Khondakar dropped his cigar into his lap. There was a brief struggle and a cloud of smoke before the two men settled back down, Khondakar in the wicker chair with his coffee and Ashim in the creaking swing with Yasmeen’s favorite blue teacup.

“But they’re only seventeen,” said the general at last. “You can’t let them.”

“Where one goes, so do the other two. And Rumi turned twenty-one back in April, so she’s free to do as she likes.”

Ashim closed his eyes.

“They took after Meenu, all three of them. What could I do in the face of her resolve, pitted against me thrice? Tomorrow it’ll be Adam leaving Shindola in uniform, and I―”

“The little one isn’t like his mother, thank God,” observed the general. “I can’t imagine Adam so much as lifting a gun, much less shooting one.”

“Before Yasmeen went, maybe,” Ashim sighed. “He doesn’t miss her as much as the girls do, I think. He didn’t even realize Uma wasn’t his mother until he was two.”

“You don’t have anything to worry about with him, then.” Khondakar took another long pull at the cigar. “I’d worry about your daughters, if I were you.”

“I am worrying. I’m worrying myself sick. But they’re more of their mother than they’ve ever been of me, and there’s not a bloody thing I can do to keep them safe.”

“So you’ve given up?”

“That’s like asking a man if he’s given up trying to change the course of the seasons. They’re beyond me. But when my baby’s old enough he’s going to want to be with his sisters, to stand by them in _Bharatmata’s_ name, and I can’t watch that happen. She’s taken my wife, my daughters―I won’t let her take my son. He’s all I have _left._ ”

“You have your life from her, Ashim,” reproved the general. “ _Bharatmata ki jai,_ always.”

“ _Haan, Bharatmata ki jai,_ ” came the whispered reply. “But I won’t give my Adam up. I won’t.”

“And you’re certain he’ll want to enlist when he comes of age?”

“He’d do it today, if it meant he could follow Rumi.”

“Then you’d better get him out of harm’s way now, before he starts thinking about it.”

“Where could I possibly send him to stop him from―”

“Do you remember the commander from the U. S. embassy?”

“The one Vani married? Vani Abidi?” Ashim frowned. Adam frowned too, crouching lower behind the back of the sofa to keep out of sight; he hadn’t known that his mother’s closest sister-in-arms had been married at all, much less to an American. “Wait, weren’t they expecting a baby when Vani was reassigned? Her transfer went through almost a year before Meena’s did, so I’m not too sure, but she was definitely―”

“They were,” nodded Khondakar, blowing out another cloud of smoke. “It was a pity, that. The commander went back home with the child after the twenty-one bombing, and Vani never saw either of them again. She was the one who sent them away, of course, but still. To lose both her _patni_ and her baby at once...”

“What happened to―”

“Stationed at an outpost of the Air Force in Arizona, last I heard. It’s a wonderful school, Ashim. You said your Adam wanted to study engineering, and they’ve got one of the best programs the West has to offer. They’re almost fully demilitarized, too. The fighter program’s nothing more than a practice run for extraterrestrial missions, so he won’t be much good to the army if he does go through their training. They even changed the outpost’s name to the Galaxy Garrison, I think. I don’t know if they even teach the students how to shoot there these days.”

Ashim laughed. “I can’t really imagine my _bulbul_ running off into space, can you?”

“Not really. He’s got his feet on the ground, that one.”

“He’d still have to register through Yudh Abhyas though, since he’d be going on a visa.” Ashim bit his lip. “And I don’t know how they’d let him in, as a foreign kid at a military school.”

“The Ahmedabad report didn’t leave anything out, you know,” said the general quietly. “Not even how they died. Adam might be like you, but he’s got his mother’s face. Her name, even. The Commander will recognize him right away, I guarantee it.”

“You really think I should send him that far? He’d be away five or six years, at least.”

“I’d never send my daughters overseas, definitely. Or my sons, if I had any.” He paused. “But you’re not…”

“I’m not what?”

“My wife is alive,” said Khondakar at last. He seemed reluctant to go on, but Ashim only smiled at the general’s discomfort and patted his jacketed shoulder.

“I know.”

He looked out into the night, bringing the cold mug of tea to his lips as Adam began to shiver behind the flowered sofa.

“That makes all the difference, I think. But how should I start with this Garrison business?”

“I’ll handle that,” the general told him. He took his phone out of his pocket and stared at the screen for a minute, running his thumb across the display before clicking it off with a sigh. “It’s been what, twenty-five years since the directorate?”

“Twenty-four.”

“High time I paid the United States a visit, then.”

*    *    *

_“But―one of the generals, I heard him―weren’t you stationed at the embassy twenty-four years ago? I thought―”_

_“I’ve never set foot off the continent, except when I served in the third world war back when I was in my twenties. Are you sure you’re all right, son?”_

_“I...I’m sorry. I’ve made a mistake, that’s all. I won’t bother you again, sir.”_

_“I didn’t ask if you’d made a mistake, Adam, I’m asking if you’re okay. I saw in your file, about your mother’s passing. Student services put in a note when you got here.”_

_“O-Oh.”_

_“You’re a third-year, right? Intended cargo class?”_

_“Yes, Commander.”_

_“Well, he’s not going to be in class with you if you’re shooting for cargo, but there’s a fighter pilot in your year called Takashi Shirogane. He’s a good boy, smart and helpful and humble to boot, except when he gets into trouble with Sam Holt’s son. You think you could try to make friends with him, maybe? I think he’ll understand where you’re coming from a lot better than most of the other kids will. It’d be good for you to have someone, right?”_

_“Yes, sir. Thank you.”_

_“No need to thank me. You remind me of―well, never mind that. Go on, go to class. You’ve got flight safety first, right? I’ll send someone to show you the way.”_

_“I can manage, sir. I have a map.”_

_“All right then. Just let me know if you need anything, okay? I’m here for you. We all are.”_

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For those of you who get tired of waiting for updates (forgive me please, there's dark stuff coming up and I'm putting off writing it) please do check out the rest of the series! It's relatively spoiler-free, and mostly takes place after Adam and Shiro get married two years after the end of this fic. I update the series around once or twice a week. 
> 
> Also, is anyone interested in a glossary for the Hindi words used here? Let me know in the comments if you are. 
> 
> and come say hi on tumblr/twitter at @datboicomehere!!! <3


	21. Chapter 21

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which all is not as it seems.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> *rolls in two months late with Starbucks* 
> 
> sup y'all
> 
> *rolls away*

“That’s got to be one of the most anticlimactic missions we’ve ever been on.”

“It’s one of the nicest missions we’ve ever been on,” observed Hunk, lifting Pidge off his back and dropping her gently onto Lance’s bunk. “No space-worm innards, or Galra fighters, or stuff that looks totally innocent and then turns out to be a bomb in disguise. Just one really weird robot about the size of Voltron and an Altean girl with pink hair that made me hungry for salmon.”

“It’ll be Friday when we get home, won’t it? Friday’s salmon bake day, or at least it used to be before we left.”

“They have salmon on Thursday nights now,” said Lance gloomily. “Friday’s vegan food and a bunch of Southern dishes, I checked the dining hall’s webpage.”

“We’re losing sight of the point, nerds,” Pidge scolded, rapping Lance over the head with her tablet stylus. “The point being that the head of Voltron’s been moping for the past two days, and we have to do something about it.”

Hunk opened his mouth. “Technically, Keith’s the head of―”

“I don’t know about you, but I don’t want to disappear into the ground every time Keith gives me a disappointed dad look,” Lance pointed out. “For all intents and purposes, Shiro’s still the head, even if Keith’s been back in Black for the past few weeks. So, ideas?”

“I don’t get why Shiro’s still miserable, to be honest. It doesn’t seem like he’s afraid Adam’s dying, and I doubt the Atlas would let anything happen to him anyway.”

“Maybe he’s still depressed about them breaking up? I mean, they were going to get married.”

“But Adam’s clearly not mad at him anymore, so why―”

“They didn’t break up, guys,” sighed Pidge. “Adam said he wouldn’t be waiting if Shiro left, but they never actually split up. That was two months before Kerberos, and they kept living together after that. Plus, Adam never stopped wearing his ring, remember? He didn’t take it off until he had to give it to my mom for safekeeping when the Atlas launched.”

“No, they broke up,” Hunk insisted, staring at Pidge in bewilderment. “Shiro didn’t tell you? He called off their engagement when the _Theia-Selene_ was about three months out from Earth and told Adam he deserved better. And then Shiro barely talked to him between then and the day he got kidnapped, aside from the daily status updates. He wrote an apology letter right after they landed on Kerberos and never got to send it, so I’m guessing Adam didn’t know Shiro still loved him until we came back.”

“I’m going to kill Matt,” Pidge muttered, yanking at her halo of pale-brown hair. “He should’ve said something about it to us, Mom and I could’ve helped―wait a second. How on Earth did you know?”

“...Shiro wrote in his diary a lot. Like, he was really detailed. I saw things I did _not_ need to see in there, trust me. I had to stop reading after a while, the stuff about his nightmares was just―” Hunk shut his eyes. “Well, you get the picture.”

“So what happened after they broke up?”

“I don’t know. If there was anything, he never put it down in writing.”

“Then we don’t know enough to do anything for Shiro,” mused Lance, tapping idly at his phone screen before darting upright with a grin. “You know who would, though?”

“Matt’s still out in the middle of nowhere with the rebels, remember? He told us not to expect any messages until the end of the month.”

“Not _Matt,_ Pidgey. _Keith_. As in, you know, the person who lived with Adam pretty much until we got shot into space?”

“I can’t believe I didn’t think of that. Hunk, go get him.”

“Not now, he’s in the hold with Shiro.” Hunk frowned. “Keith decided that Shiro needed company if he was going to sit down there and stare at the vault all day, so we can’t get anything out of him until one of them leaves.”

There was no further conversation for a while after that, until Lance sat up and tweaked Pidge’s ear with a worried look on his face. “So are we going to talk about the other thing? Or just put it off until this whole war deal ends? Because I’m cool with that, I just want to know if that’s what we’ve decided on.”

“No, you’re right,” Pidge sighed. “I tried to bring it up with Allura when we were on the way here, but she just brushed me off. And I was _trying_ to ask Shiro, but he was freaking out about Adam, and he doesn’t remember much from the clone’s point of view anyway. That part of his memory’s completely scrambled, so he’s not going to be any help at all.”

“I don’t blame Allura for not wanting to deal with it, she was half in love with the guy.”

“But what he said didn’t make any _sense_ ,” Hunk protested. “Lotor told her she didn’t understand. He knew how devoted to her people she was before Altea fell, it doesn’t stand to reason that he’d say that if he was really draining the Alteans from the second colony for fuel. Even if he was a homicidal maniac―and I’m not saying he wasn’t―he had to have known that Allura wouldn’t listen to him. But he seemed like he was _expecting_ her to. Like he was sure she’d agree once she heard him out.”

“That’s what’s been bothering me, too,” groaned Lance, dropping back into Hunk’s lap. “Lotor would never have thought she’d be okay with whatever was going on at Colony Two, if it was that bad. He might have been a selfish snake, but he wasn’t a complete moron.”

“I wish Shiro’s clone hadn’t activated. We could’ve at least asked Lotor to explain, or asked him to go into that memory tube where we put Sendak after he tried to take over the Castle.”

“But then there’s the _other_ side of it!” Lance threw up his hands. “If Lotor wasn’t draining quintessence out of them for fuel, what _was_ he doing? Why did Bandor fly back to Colony One to warn Romelle? And even if Lotor was draining the Alteans, that was way more quintessence than he could have used, even for the Sincline. So if he really was a homicidal maniac, why so _many_ Alteans?”

“Maybe for future use or something?” Pidge suggested. “I mean, it’s like you said. He wasn’t stupid. But Keith said there were maybe thousands of Alteans there, and that…”

“Doesn’t make sense,” said Hunk gloomily, picking at a stray thread on his trousers. “None of this does.”

“This whole Lotor business is going to come back and bite us in the end.” Lance shivered. “I keep thinking he’s still lurking out there, waiting for us.”

Pidge scrolled through her image gallery and stopped at one of their rare group photographs, taken when Keith came back one quintant to deliver intel from the Blades. She and Lance and Hunk were dabbing in the foreground with Shiro rolling his eyes and beckoning Keith closer behind them, and Allura was trying to copy the pose at Lance’s right with Coran. Lotor’s height had made it impossible for him to get into the frame with the rest of them, so he was sitting on the floor with Allura’s mice fast asleep on his shoulders.

He didn’t look like a murderer, now that she thought about it. His nose was scrunched up to avoid Chulatt’s tail, and he had one clawed hand hovering protectively over Chuchule.

“I don’t think he’s waiting out there,” she whispered, remembering the collapsing rift and the way it had driven Lotor to madness before closing with him inside it. “But something else is. I can feel it.”

*    *    *

“Shiro?”

“Yeah?”

“It’s almost nine,” came a gentle voice at his right, followed by a poke on the back of his neck. “Don’t you think it’s time you ate dinner? Or slept, even?”

“He might wake up,” Shiro murmured, tracing the silvery glass just above Adam’s closed eyes. “I don’t want him to be alone when he does.”

 _He won’t wake up any time soon_ , said the Atlas, flashing an irritated beam of light into Shiro’s face. _The tiny one is right. He’d be worrying himself sick if he knew how long you’ve been down here._

“Why can’t we open the vault?” complained Keith, looking pitifully at his brother’s bitten fingernails. “We’re not going to hurt him, you know. Shiro just wants to hold his hands.”

_Be that as it may, the vault keeps him from aging. Every second you leave it open is a second you strip from his life after he wakes up. If that is something Takashi would like on his conscience, then I have no objection._

“No, leave it shut,” sighed Shiro, rubbing his eyes. “I was about to leave, anyway. Thank you for letting us sit here so long.”

_It was no trouble, Takashi. It is a joy to me, to see how tenderly you love my Pilot, and how dearly you hope for him to wake and speak to you again. But it is my duty to keep you and the little one safe on his behalf, and this is...unhealthy, to say the least. I have been watching, and you hardly eat, or drink, or even speak to your friends now that the Wasp has been dealt with._

It paused and dimmed the bulbs over Adam’s face, casting his gentle face into shadow as if to soothe him to sleep. _Mend this, and Adam will hear nothing of it._

Shiro’s jaw dropped. “Are you saying you’ll _tell_ on me?”

_I’m saying exactly that._

“Ha!” Keith crowed, bursting into laughter. “It was always Adam who made you eat on time when you were sick, remember? You better shape up, or he’ll give you hell when all this is over. He’ll give you those big brown heartbroken eyes, and you’ll be begging for forgiveness in two seconds flat.”

“Fine, fine.”

Shiro bent down and kissed the glass over Adam’s lips, smiling sadly as the screen went blank and flickered back to its resting phase. “Sleep, my _janaana_. Don’t worry, I’ll come back to see you again as soon as I can.”

*    *    *

_Encounter date: 04/30/2142_

_Supervising physician: Castile, Juliana_

_Patient Name: Ahluwalia, Adam Umarzai_

_Date of Birth: 07/20/2114_

_Rank: Lieutenant General_

_Citizenship: Classified_

_Current State: Hypersleep (activated 05/18/2140) & Deceased, Killed in Action (Official Records, 05/16/2140) _

_Sex: Male_

_Age: 25 (c. 05/18/2140) & NULL, official (c. 04/30/2142) _

_Weight: 77 kilograms_

_Notes: Complete sudden-onset tissue necrosis in the third and fourth fingers of the right hand extending into the upper region of the palm with no detectable cause. No metabolic activity observed in the affected region, nor does the necrotic tissue appear to be spreading. Risk of blood sepsis/infection appears to be nil, due to the capabilities of the IGF-Atlas’s containment unit. The patient experienced a complete lack of awareness from approximately 04/28/2142 at 13:56 after disabling a semi-autonomous spacecraft, and has not been responsive to stimuli since. Commander Mitch Iverson and Admiral Ellen Sanda informed of the patient’s current condition; due to complications with the patient’s next of kin (First Flight Officer Takashi Shirogane and Keith Kogane, civilian) being officially deceased, domestic familial information privileges remain with Colleen O’Shaughnessey-Holt (civilian) until further notice._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> come say hi on tumblr/twitter at @datboicomehere!! :3


	22. Chapter 22

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Adam goes home.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Please leave feedback for this chapter, guys ;-; this was one of the hardest things I've ever had to write in my life, for nO APPARENT REASON, and it got so long I had to split it in two, so expect the second half next week!

Keith remembers feeling thoroughly lost in the fortnight after the _Theia-Selene_ went missing. He had, in the span of three days, been stripped of everything he was given on that fateful morning Shiro came to visit his sixth-grade class: his place at the Garrison, his future as a fighter pilot, and worst of all the closest thing he had ever had to a brother, the hand that led him out of the darkness and into a home, a family. 

But it was Adam who made the flat a home, he knew. It was Adam who sent them off each day with packed lunches and notes of encouragement written on flowered napkins, Adam who nursed Shiro and Keith through winter colds and the odd bout of flu, Adam whose voice was enough to steady them both when the double burdens of grief and illness grew too heavy to bear. 

Keith watched over him night and day in the weeks after Shiro’s funeral, scanning his careworn face like a hawk for signs of distress or pain—but nothing changed even when Adam came home one night with a folded flag and Shiro’s collection of flight medals, and if not for the sickening weight in his stomach Keith could almost forget that Shiro was dead. It was far, far easier to imagine that he was still off somewhere with Matt and Sam, pushing the boundaries of space travel and so far away that daily messages, while comforting, were a definite impracticality. 

One morning in October, a week before his birthday, Keith trudged out of his bedroom and found Adam sitting on the sofa with a lapful of yellow marigolds. He was threading them onto a garland with a long silver needle, piercing the blossoms through their centers and drawing the point of the needle out again once it passed through the stems. 

“What are you doing?” Keith asked, watching as Adam inspected a flower before dropping it back into the box at his feet. “Is that for the temple or something?”

Adam shook his head and pointed to the neatly wrapped parcel on the coffee table. 

“I ordered a portrait of Takashi last week, remember? I thought we should have something for him here, since I sent his flag and his honors back to obaa-chan and his grandfather.” He sighed and brushed a lock of dark hair off his forehead, counting the blooms on his loop of thread before tying them off. “Open it for me, would you?”

Keith did as he was told, tearing the wrinkled brown paper off the frame and staring down at—

“It’s not a formal portrait,” he murmured, blinking away tears. It was probably the furthest thing from a formal portrait Adam could have chosen, really; it was a picture of Shiro sitting cross-legged on a checkered picnic blanket, holding a cup of red sorbet in his palms and laughing with his head thrown back at the person behind the camera. He was young, too, probably no older than eighteen, and as Keith’s eyes drifted downwards he spotted a bit of skinny bare knee that had surely belonged to Matt. 

“What are you going to do with it?” he said thickly, handing the portrait to Adam. “It’s too big to fit on Shiro’s altar with your parents, unless you’re getting a new one.”

“No, I’m not going to move that.” Adam took a pen from his pocket and leaned up over Ryou and Himeko Shirogane’s smiling faces, marking two dots on the wall for Shiro’s portrait. “Does this look even to you, _baba?_ Here, come help me put the picture up.”

Keith only succeeded in stubbing his toes and knocking the photograph of Adam’s parents off the cabinet, so Adam shooed him back to the couch and put up Shiro’s picture himself before hanging the garland of marigolds over the frame. He gave no explanation as to what the flowers were for, but Keith could guess at why; Adam would never have garlanded a living person’s photograph, no matter whose it was. 

“Wait, Keith _,_ where are you going? What’s wrong?”

“Can I take the Ceti out?” he blurted, edging toward the hook where the car keys hung with the keys to his hoverbike and Adam’s old blue motorcycle. “I need some air.”

“Okay, but be back by—” He didn’t wait to hear the rest of the sentence, snatching the keys off the wall and running out into the parking lot with his face half-hidden by a hat to smother his tears. 

Adam had his own broken heart to handle, after all. Keith would rather have chewed off his own tongue than give him the pain of seeing him cry. 

*    *    *

It was nearly December before things started to go back to normal. 

The marigolds on Shiro’s laughing portrait had long since faded and been replaced by a wreath of silk carnations that Keith had picked out from the craft store; Katie had finally settled into the Garrison, blissfully unaware that Iverson knew perfectly well who she was and just didn’t care as long as she stayed out of his office. It made Keith grin to think about it, especially when Adam came home one afternoon and relayed the conversation he had had on the subject with Sanda. 

“She wasn’t even _mad_ ,” Adam snorted, slicing a slab of milky-white kernels off an ear of fresh corn. “Katie wasn’t even banned from the grounds, apparently. Iverson just said she was and got security to take her back to Colleen.”

“She doesn’t look much like herself now that her hair’s short,” mused Keith, who was sitting on the countertop and emptying a box of peppermints. “But she looks exactly like Matt, so I don’t know what kind of disguise _that_ was supposed to be.”

“But she isn’t in trouble, and that’s the important thing. Plus, _I_ didn’t even get written up for doctoring her application after she turned it in.”

“Iverson actually likes you, Adam. You could hit someone with a crowbar in front of him and he’d probably believe you had a good reason.” Keith frowned. “I still don’t get why, though. Sam always used to say you were just as much of a rebel as Matt was. Wasn’t there something about you and Matt stealing an electronic warfare craft back before Shiro asked you out?”

“Ah, the infamous Raven. No, we didn’t steal it. We just borrowed it.”

“...Borrowed?”

“Borrowed without permission. And all we did was use it to scatter campaign flyers for one of our friends, anyway.”

“Was that what got you stuck on salad duty for three months?”

“Unfortunately, yes. But it _also_ led directly to Takashi finally working up the nerve to confess, so it wasn’t all bad,” Adam laughed, brushing the band of Shiro’s gold ring with his thumb. “I guess the lesson there is that getting into trouble with the love of your life might make them tell you how they feel, so that’s something to remember.”

“I never got in trouble with anyone except that one kid in your intro physics class,” scoffed Keith. “The one that kept tying sparkly ribbons on my backpack while I wasn’t looking remember? I highly doubt Taylor Hernández is going to be the love of my life.”

“No comment, Keith,” said Adam, who looked as if he knew something Keith didn’t. “And didn’t you and Hernández just sneak into the experimental sims at lunch? That’s more the kind of thing Matt and Takashi used to do before I came along. Hardly the stuff of soulmates.”

“ _Hardly._ And anyway, Hernández didn’t even talk to me after primary divisions came out in third year.”

“What?” Adam put down his knife. “Didn’t talk to you? Why?”

“He ended up in cargo after primaries, and when I found out, I...well, I—”

“ _Keith._ ”

“It wasn’t my fault! I _wanted_ to be paired up with Taylor, but he _had_ to get the flu and miss the whole review period and then refuse to postpone the theory exam because he was _so_ sure he’d do just fine on it!” Keith scowled. “He was really good, Adam! His flight marks were just under mine, but no, he had to go mess up on theory and end up stuck in cargo. And I got stuck with Griffin for a flight partner. Griffin sucks. I know it’s been years since he said that stuff about my parents, but he sucks.”

“Language,” chided Adam, tearing open a package of frozen peas. “James isn’t a bad kid, just hungry for approval. You watch, he’ll be fine after he finds something that makes him happy and isn’t for the sake of marks and rankings.”

“Is there even such a thing?”

“Yes, there is. You remember how sweet he was on Ina Leifsdottir.”

“Ina?” spluttered Keith, sending a peppermint shooting out of his mouth and straight into Adam’s bowl of potato peelings. “Oh my god, no. You better put a stop to that, right now. She’s way too good for him.”

“Why?”

“He’s a jerk, that’s why! A responsible teacher would have kept them apart, and you know it.”

“Would you rather Hernández was sweet on her instead?”

“That’s not—Taylor wouldn’t—Ina’s too good for everyone, let’s just leave it at that.”

“Even you?”

“ _Adam!_ ”

“Okay, okay, even you.” Adam paused and lowered the flame under the pot of boiling stock, pouring in the peas and potatoes before turning back to Keith. “So...winter break’s coming up soon.”

“For you, yeah. What about it?”

“And I was thinking that since I’m free, and you don’t have any exams to worry about in January, maybe we could go somewhere.”

“Go somewhere?” Keith repeated, sliding off the counter. “Like, skiing? Or camping?”

“No, I was—I was thinking about going home, actually.”

“Home? You mean, like, to India?”

“I haven’t gone back since right after I graduated, so I thought maybe it was time,” shrugged Adam. “But we don’t have to if you don’t want to, okay? I’m not needed there for anything in particular, so if you’d rather stay home—”

He hadn’t said  _I didn’t go back because Takashi was away on missions half the time and I had to take care of you,_ thought Keith. Nor had he said _I never went back because I couldn’t leave Takashi, and because taking him away from his doctors might have killed him,_ or even that _I didn’t want to overwhelm you with a houseful of people you didn’t know, baba. You like peace and quiet, so I thought it was best we all stayed here._

“What’s this for?” Adam smiled, patting his head as Keith walked over to his side and hugged him. “Keith?”

“Yeah,” he mumbled, pushing his face as far as it would go into Adam’s knitted sweater. “Yeah, I want to go. When are we leaving?”

*    *    *

Packing for vacation was an adventure of its own kind, as Keith discovered one Saturday morning when he walked into the living room and fell into a suitcase almost as large as he was. Adam was sitting on the floor and folding mountains of clothes, including a fair-sized stack of garments that had definitely belonged to Shiro and a pile of dark green cargo shorts Keith had never seen before. 

“Whose are those?” he asked, rolling out of the suitcase and dusting himself off. “You never wear shorts.”

“It’s my height,” said Adam drily. “Too much leg, according to Matt, so they’re yours now. It’s going to be hot in Shindola, and those skinny jeans won’t cut it. Go try them on.”

“My legs are going to get sunburned,” Keith complained. “Do I have to?”

“At least _try_ them. And then get dressed, because we have to go get you a passport.”

The process of getting ready to leave took about a week, expedited by their convenient proximity to a military base. Adam managed to get Keith’s passport printed only two days after ordering it, and nine days after the tickets were booked Keith found himself kicking his heels in a cramped economy window seat and eating roasted peanuts flavored with pepper and honey mustard. Over the course of the next twelve hours he learned very quickly that commercial aircrafts had none of the smooth precision of the Garrison’s planes; a thunderstorm eighty miles out from Seoul nearly had him throwing up his dinner, and by the time he stumbled shakily down onto solid ground in Ahmedabad the next morning he looked about five shades paler than usual. 

“This was a bad idea,” he mumbled, grabbing Adam’s arm and pulling him out of the path of a luggage cart. “I’m never getting on one of those deathtraps again. Never.”

“It won’t be so bad on the way home, _baba._ ” Adam said, dragging their suitcases off the carousel. “Return flights always seem shorter for some reason. But we’ve got a two-hour ride before we get to my grandfather’s house, so do you want to take a break and have lunch before getting the autocar?”

“No, I just want a bed that doesn’t shake.” Keith wiped his forehead. “And food that doesn’t taste like plane cabin.”

“Honestly, it’s better you don’t have anything here,” muttered Adam, glancing suspiciously at the food court just past the exit. “Airport food is airport food all the world over, anyway. Do you have the packed sandwiches from home?”

“Yeah, they’re still in the vacuum sleeve and everything. Can we eat them in the car?”

“Sure, just don’t spill. Oh look, there’s the rental garage.”

The Keith of sixteen hours ago would have jumped at the chance to ride in an autocar, but as it was he only fell onto a seat in the limousine-like passenger compartment of the one Adam had rented and fell fast asleep with the bag of ham sandwiches dangling from his fingers. Adam sat on the padded driver’s bench and watched the steering wheel turn back and forth in front of him, sipping from a bottle of iced coffee to keep himself from dozing off. He understood the car’s accident-proof software well enough to distrust it, after all; the meme about engineers keeping loaded guns at the ready to shoot their twenty-first century printers might as well have been made about him, if one ignored the fact that the Rugel handgun at the apartment had been Takashi’s. 

“You can sleep too, you know,” Keith mumbled, blinking awake a little while later to stuff a sandwich into his mouth. “‘At’s the poin’ of an autocar.”

“You wouldn’t put your kid’s life in the hands of an AI either,” said Adam dryly. “Not if you had a master’s in engineering and knew better, anyway. I’ve got to stay awake in case the car loses control, or can’t sense a truck in time or something.”

“What’s the chance of that happening?”

“Less than a hundredth of a percent,” Adam admitted. “They’re safer than traditional automobiles, but a second pair of eyes never hurts, right?”

“I guess so. Hey, can I have some coffee too?”

“There’s another bottle in my backpack,” yawned Adam. “But don’t finish it, okay? I might need it later.”

“How long do we have left?”

“Another hour, according to the GPS. Go back to sleep, I’ll wake you up when we get there.”

Keith did as he was told, finishing the last crumbs of cheese and drinking half the coffee before falling into a foggy dream about the day he and Pidge made a blanket fort in her room when Shiro first went into the hospital. When he woke again the windows were open on a plain of pitch-black sky, sparkling with stars that hung lower and closer and brighter than they ever had in Maricopa. The air smelled cleaner, like fresh-turned earth and something tart and sweet and heady and good enough to eat, and in the distance he caught sight of hulking hills cloaked by green forest and half-hidden behind a veil of silver fog. They were the source of that intoxicating fragrance, he realized—light and heavy all at once, and so reminiscent of Adam himself that he turned and stared at the driver’s seat to make sure he was still sitting there. 

“Eucalyptus forests,” Adam murmured. “That’s the smell.”

“But I’ve smelled eucalyptus,” said Keith, feeling something wrench in his own chest as a tear streaked down Adam’s face. “There’s something else—”

“Strawberries,” whispered his brother-in-law, closing his eyes and inhaling deeply. “We’re on the edge of my family’s property now.”

“Then who lives in those houses with lights in the windows? I thought it was just your aunt, grandfather, and your cousin here. And your sisters when they’re on furlough.”

“Those houses belong to the tenant farmers. Most of the bungalows on the estate do, actually.”

“Tenant farmers? You guys have _tenants?_ ”

“Well, not exactly tenants,” Adam amended. “They don’t pay rent, because we get more workers during the planting and harvesting seasons that way. A few of them have lived here for two or three generations, so those properties belong to their families now. But the rest never stay longer than five to ten years, mostly.”

“How much land does your family even own?”

“Five hundred and fifty-four acres, last I checked. Our property begins at the mouth of the valley and goes right to the beginning of the woods on the far side.”

“Shut _up,_ ” breathed Keith, leaning further out the window as Adam burst into laughter. “When you said your family owned a farm I thought you had, like, a few fruit fields and some cows, not _this!_ ”

“What was I _supposed_ to say?” 

“Oh, I don’t know. Maybe, ‘hello, Keith, I own a piece of land the size of a national park and decided to tough it at military school just because?’”

“When would that have even come up, _beta?_ ”

“There was definitely an opportunity at some point.” Keith pointed a finger at him. “I’ve lived with you for the past five years.”

“Okay, okay,” Adam chuckled, leaning back in his chair as the autocar rounded a corner and began trundling down another road lined on either side by quiet green fields. “Look, there’s my parents’ house up ahead.”

“It’s dark,” noted Keith. “Where is everyone?”

“At my grandparents’ place,” smiled Adam, pointing further down the lane to a house lit from top to bottom like a temple during Deepavali. “It’s where the head of the family lives.”

His eyes looked like a pair of round saucers reflecting the light from the lamps shining ahead, and as his chest rose and fell his breath seemed to echo the gurgling of the river running beside them. For a moment he sounded as if he wanted to shout, or weep, and as the car drew nearer to the glittering cottage he ducked his head and wiped his eyes on his shawl. 

“Are you okay?” Keith whispered. “Adam?”

“Yeah. Yeah, I’m fine.”

“They’re not waiting outside?”

“I asked them not to,” Adam admitted, making no move to get out of the car. “I—I’ve still got the key, so.” 

He was fidgeting with his engagement ring, twisting the golden band around his third finger as he used to do with the old ring his father had given him before he left for the Garrison, and as a teardrop splashed onto the compass’s center diamond Keith thought he understood why. 

“I don’t even remember who I was when I left this place behind,” he breathed, trembling like a leaf as Keith laid a hand on his shoulder. “Everything’s changed, _baba._ ”

“Some things have,” Keith corrected, nearly breaking into tears himself as he thought of Shiro’s eighteen-year-old face forever frozen in laughter and garlanded with red carnations. “But some things don’t have to.”

_You’ve got me still, remember? You never left me, not once, and I’m never going to leave you. I promised._

Adam set his jaw and nodded. 

“Okay.”

And with that he stepped out of the car and drew in a lungful of sweet-smelling air, choking on a sob at the taste of it as he started toward the house and then began to run—down the path and up the porch steps, so quickly that he tripped at the top of the stairs and fell against the door with a crash like a sudden thunderclap. He stood there panting for a moment, tracing the wood with his fingertips as someone cried out on the other side, and then—

“Adam, _beta?_ ”

The door flew open, and as it swung inward a flood of light washed over Adam’s face, wiping the grief of the past four years from his eyes as he crumpled to the ground and pressed his forehead to the tiles at his sister’s feet. 

“I’m home, Rumi. I’m _home._ ”

  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> find me on tumblr/twitter at @datboicomehere!!


	23. Chapter 23

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which we come back to the present.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> *shows up two months late again with Peet's*
> 
> this is superior coffee y'all
> 
> *skates away*

It was often difficult for Keith to imagine that Adam had been a child, at some point. It seemed to him (as it had from the day Shiro first brought him home) that Adam had come into being just as he was now, with a gentle voice and careful hands and eyes that were always tender and bright no matter what storms blew around them. Keith never dreamed that the calloused fingers that packed his lunches and sewed on lost buttons had once been covered with oil burns from stealing  _ jilebis  _ out of the pot, or sticky with sugar from making syrup for butterflies—or even black with soot and ash from lighting sparklers and dropping them down the chimney that led to his fourth-grade classroom. 

“These were  _ yours? _ ” Keith exclaimed, after Adam’s aunt bundled him up in a roll of blankets and tucked him into bed on their first night in Shindola. He was pointing at the dusty shelf nailed to the opposite wall, where Uma stored all the various mischief-making contraptions Adam and his sisters had built nearly twenty years previously. “Are you kidding me?  _ You  _ had a robot made specifically to ding-dong-ditch people?”

“Well, yeah,” said Adam, peering out of his nest of quilts on the floor. “I once had a voice-activated MP3 that quacked whenever my math teacher started talking.”

“You did not.”

“I did,” Adam laughed. “I was a nightmare to have in class when I was little. Ask any of my old professors. Matt and I wouldn’t stop quoting memes under our breath in Sam’s flight safety class back when we had him in fourth year.”

“When did you change?” wondered Keith, snuggling down under his quilt. “You’ve always been so...responsible.”

Adam said nothing for a while, and at last Keith squinted over the side of the bed to see if he had fallen asleep—only to find him lying on his back, with his eyes wide open and fixed on something just outside the window.

“Adam?”

“What? Oh, right.” 

He paused and glanced away again, and this time Keith could not tell what Adam was looking at; he seemed to be trying to drink the whole room in, as if he suspected that the silent farmhouse was part of some vivid dream. 

“What did you want to know,  _ baba? _ ”

“Just when you stopped being a kid, I suppose.”

“I think it was around the time I graduated,” he said at last, covering himself with the blankets until all that Keith could see of him was a tuft of unruly hair. “Matt went home for a while before he came back to go on with his degree, but I stayed in the dorms with Takashi and went on supply missions with him...and then one day I started to realize I didn’t need to be that unruly kid anymore. I mean, I had Takashi, and we had some money coming in from teaching, and it felt like we had a future together, somehow. I wanted to make that happen for us, so the rest of it just fell by the wayside.”

“Why just then, though?” inquired Keith, still trying to reconcile the patient guardian he knew with the little boy who had once wreaked all kinds of havoc under that very roof. “Why not when you and Shiro first got together?”

“Because that’s when we first got to be alone,” Adam laughed. “When Matt was there, it was almost like we were forcing ourselves to be casual about it because of how young we were. Like it wouldn’t really matter if we broke up, since we’d still be best friends after everything was over and even get to laugh about it now and then. “But I never felt that way, and Takashi never did, either. 

“I always knew he was the one for me, right from the first, and when I told him so it was like breathing for the first time. I could tell him night and day how much I loved him, and he could tell me, and there was no one to tell us we were going too fast or didn’t know what we were doing, or that we wouldn’t last because we didn’t have a clue about life in general. Matt would have never said anything like that, of course, but...we were just shy, especially Takashi.”

“You,  _ shy? _ ”

“As hard as it might be to believe, I wasn’t actually born as the epitome of cool and sass I am now.”

“Cool my foot. You made me a supplement schedule chart and taped it right on the front of my binder so I wouldn’t forget. I had to carry that around for  _ years, _ Adam. Years.”

“Hey! I used those galaxy gel pens, remember? You can’t deny it looked cool.”

“No, it didn’t,” said Keith dryly. “Because it was still a  _ supplement chart _ .”

“But  _ baba,  _ you were so thin when you first came home. Takashi and I were just worried, that’s all.”

Keith felt a drop of something warm and strengthening slip down his throat at the thought, even though both his guardians’ love had been proved a thousand times over in the years he had spent with them. The fact that Shiro had worried too seemed doubly sweet, he thought—Shiro had tried so hard to be the “cool” one in the beginning, which meant he left virtually all the scolding about self-care to Adam—but now that Keith was older he remembered Shiro promenading around the kitchen holding one of the vegetable vitamin drinks  _ he  _ was supposed to have, and pretending to whisper to Matt that the smoothies were the reason he had such good reflexes back in flight school. 

_ It still doesn’t feel real,  _ he mused, dimly noting that Adam had fallen asleep in his blanket nest on the floor.  _ Adam doesn’t even act like he’s gone, only like he’s gone away for a while.  _

_ Maybe all of  this is just a weird dream. _

He did dream that night, of smooth purple hands cradling his head and the stone in his father’s old knife sparking violet, casting an eerie glow over the blade as it lengthened into something that looked like a Chinese  _ dao  _ sword. He dreamed of Shiro and Adam sitting together in the living room, heads bowed close over the tiny foster kitten they were looking after for Sanda—and then of Shiro crying in the dark, sobbing helplessly over his bare left hand as Matt lay still and unmoving in his lap with Sam slumped onto his shoulder. He dreamed of Taylor Hernandez’s face stretched wide into a childish grin as he pinned yet  _ another  _ red ribbon onto the strap of Keith’s back, and Taylor’s hand in his as they raced down the halls towards the locked junior sims to race for the fifth time that week. 

But then he awoke, and Taylor was Lance, sleeping at his right with Hunk on his other side and Pidge sprawled against the wall. There was no blanket nest at Keith’s left, no shelf of playthings by the window—there was no window either, really, just a tiny porthole that looked out on the Triangulum galaxy slipping by like water under a bridge. 

_ “Adam—do you think, maybe—that Shiro could still be alive?” _

_ “I feel like he’s still here, like he never left at all. It could mean something, or it could just be the nonsense of a broken heart. Don’t...don’t think too much about it, okay?” _

_ “But your heart isn’t broken.” _

_ “Not completely, that’s true. I won’t pretend it is, because—because that would be an insult to Mrs. Holt and Katie.” _

_ “Why? Mrs. Holt lost her husband, and Shiro was going to be yours. And Matt was your best friend.” _

_ “They lost almost everything, baba. But I didn’t, I’ve still got you.” _

And with that Keith turned his face to the door and cried aloud, weeping without restraint even as Lance and Pidge awoke in a panic and tried to comfort him—because he himself was more at fault for Adam’s suffering than anyone, and now that the world was quiet again he could not forget it. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Guys, I am beyond sorry for this late update. I've found it difficult to keep with the plot in between school and moving (hence why I uploaded so many oneshots between now and the last chapter) but I am back! Huzzah. 
> 
> quick notes: 
> 
> 1\. if you're new and get tired of waiting for new chapters check out the rest of the series!
> 
> 2\. as always, come say hi on tumblr/twitter at @datboicomehere!


	24. Chapter 24

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which the Atlas and Shiro talk, again.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> updating on time? hold on to your hats, because it won't be happening again  
> *dabs*

Time never seemed to pass normally in space. 

Of course, Shiro’s first-year physics classes had taught him that time _didn’t_ pass normally when you were traveling at close to a hundred times the speed of light―but then he arrived at the Castle of Lions and found out that time passed as quickly as usual whether you were on a moving ship or sitting still, which was a kettle of relativity fish Pidge and Matt (and Adam, too) would likely have lost their minds obsessing over. 

 _Oh, he did,_ said the Atlas, interrupting his reverie. _He wouldn’t stop talking about that when the two of us were first separated. I didn’t understand why it interested him so much then, but time seems like a weighty thing for your kind._

“I didn’t say anything,” Shiro pointed out, mildly surprised by how quickly the ship had understood his train of thought. “How did you know?”

 _I can usually tell what everyone onboard is thinking,_ the Atlas revealed. _It’s easiest to decipher the people my Pilot knew best, though. You, the Commander, Keith and the little green Paladin―your thoughts are louder than the others’. And the green paladin’s parents’, though her mother’s mind was too painful to touch until you all came home._

“Do you always know what someone’s thinking, then?”

 _Only if I try._ The ship paused and brightened the red lights over Adam’s body as if searching for solace in his face, returning his washed-out skin to a healthy copper color before going back to the Morse interpreter. _And I don’t like to try, not really. I never touch even my Pilot’s thoughts unless he gives me leave to, though I have nearly all of his memories._

It paused again. 

 _Some of those are too painful to touch, too,_ it confessed. _I feel the pain Katie’s mother suffered as hers, but the pain I feel from my Pilot’s grief is mine. I leave his past alone for the most part, unless I have no choice._

“I’m sorry,” Shiro whispered, wondering when he had gotten used to these brief snatches of conversation, and even come to feel no lack in them; he hardly said anything at all when he spoke with the Atlas, and now he was more certain than ever that the ship was heart-breakingly _lonely_. Perhaps the burden of being was too much for it to bear now that it had a will of its own, and without Adam’s steady presence to comfort it―

 _I_ was _your Pilot, for years,_ it told him, heaving a little sigh in his mind as Adam slept on between them. _There was no division between Adam and myself until perhaps four months ago. What you perceive as me―it was_ him, _once. They laid him here and anchored the siphon into his heart, and then every part of my body received a bit of his spirit. He felt it on his skin when my particle barrier was damaged, and when they first used my weaponry my Pilot fell into a fever that burned for days and somehow did him no harm―he and I were one, and now that it is no longer so it has been difficult, to say the least._

“Is that why his heart nearly stopped back then? Was it you two becoming―well, two instead of one?”

 _Yes and no,_ the ship pondered. _We were mostly the same before, and it is true that since then we have been wholly separate, but the change was more than that. My parting from Adam would have come in time no matter what, but this―it was begun when I was first made, I think, and your party’s arrival had something to do with its completion._

“Was it Allura?” Shiro asked, vaguely remembering the feeling of being drawn out of Black’s consciousness and carried within Allura’s body until she placed him into the shell of his clone. “She once healed a dying planet with her own quintessence, back when I was one of the paladins. Her presence might have been enough to finish whatever happened with you.”

_No, it was not the Princess. I do not know who it was, or what, but it could not have been her._

“It must have been the lions, then.”

 _Perhaps,_ said the Atlas skeptically. _But wouldn’t their energy have been depleted if that were the case?_

“I honestly have no idea,” he confessed. “They’re a bit like you, though, so it makes sense.”

 _The lions are nothing like me, Takashi,_ snapped the Atlas, offended. _Do they speak? Do they notice a soul besides their paladins, even? They are_ vessels, _and their only worth is that when united they allow their pilots to act as one. From what the little one’s father told my Pilot, their making was responsible for the war that took you from your family and ruined half the universe. Perhaps you need them now, but all of creation would have been better off if they had never existed._

“That isn’t fair,” Shiro protested, biting back a shout at the insult to Black―Black whom he still so desperately loved, who had sheltered him for nearly a year until his friends found him a body, Black who had accepted him as her paladin when he was nothing but a broken pilot with a fast-approaching expiration date, warped by months in Haggar’s captivity and the torture of the Galran arena. “They’ve never wanted anything but to help us, you know that.”

 _That is true,_ said the ship, changing tack so quickly that it left him reeling. _But that does not matter to me. Their existence spared my Pilot’s life by beginning the war, and I had forgotten that._

Shiro felt his stomach drop somewhere into the region of his boots. 

 _“What?”_ he croaked, hands trembling as they curled into fists on the glass over Adam’s face. “I don’t understand what you mean.”

_That my pilot was dying when he came to me, of course._

There was a breath of silence that seemed to go on for hours, and then―

_Didn’t you know?_

“No, he wasn’t.” Shiro shook his head wildly, clinging to the half-faded image of Adam screaming with laughter on the first afternoon their two pet eagles took flight, or hunched over a laptop in the lab he shared with Matt in the months before the Kerberos mission―or _anything,_ to banish the thought of him suffering in any way at all. “Sam told me he was going to fly the MFE-Kaikaus before he was reassigned to the Atlas, so he couldn’t have been.”

The strange tingle of the ship’s presence in his mind grew stronger, moving from thought to thought as if hunting for inconsistencies. _That is not how I remember it,_ it countered. _Perhaps he would have done, if he had recovered well enough. But he was away in his own country before we were launched, and after his first year overseas the doctors there could do nothing more for him, so they sent him home._

“But what _happ―_ ”

_My Pilot was hardly coherent during those five months, so I know nothing about his illness save that he was treated for it at the Garrison. His commanding officer thought he would do better here, I remember._

“And did he?” he cried. “He got well, didn’t he? No one told me anything about him being sick, not even Sam, or Iverson.”

 _He is in no danger now,_ the Atlas assured him. _Every cell and sinew in his body has been preserved, save for his heart. He will leave me as young and strong as he was before he created me, even if a hundred years pass between now and then. I promise._

“And whatever was wrong with him won’t be a problem?” Shiro’s voice cracked over the words, and though he had downed two cups of green tea and a sandwich before coming to the hold he felt as if he were dying of thirst and hunger all at once. “Being with you is healing him, right? That’s why he’s okay?”

In response, the Atlas projected what looked like a full-body scan onto the lid of the power chamber, turning the glass completely opaque so that Adam’s shuttered eyes vanished from view beneath it. Shiro glanced down and recognized the outlines of skin and bones and organs and saw nothing too badly amiss, though the figure looked slightly shrunken from the way he had seen it last. 

“Everything’s fine,” he noted, heart slowing down just slightly as the overlying notes updated themselves to display that Adam’s body seemed to be in perfect working order. “His brain’s okay, his heart’s okay, his muscles are...wait, stop.”

The scan flickered back to the skeletal reading, chilling Shiro’s blood like ice as he thought for a second time of what Adam had been before Kerberos all those years ago. “No, bring back the dermal layer. I don’t want to look at his bones, I’ve seen them already.”

 _Pay that no mind,_ the Atlas said hurriedly. _That’s nothing, only scar tissue._

“Tell me where it came from, then!” he shouted, pulling up the dermal scan himself and pointing to the band of striations just visible behind Adam’s ribs. “He didn’t have these when I left, who―”

_I don’t know. He doesn’t remember who it was._

“Doesn’t remember? The last time I saw trauma like this it was on one of the gladiators in Zarkon’s arena, don’t you _dare_ say he doesn’t remember!”

 _I know what happened, but there is no memory of it taking place,_ explained the ship. _I know it in the way I would know if he had only told me. He did not suffer because of it, I swear to you._

“That isn’t possible! Look at how many there are, he―”

_There was no time for him to suffer. Not for this._

Shiro blinked. “What? What do you mean there wasn’t time?”

But the screen had fallen dark again, and a second later the scan on the vault’s glass panel melted away, revealing Adam’s sweet face as still and tranquil as ever beneath it. The siphon at his breast pulsed once and sparked like a beacon as Shiro began to cry, as if it had heard and wanted nothing more than to comfort him―but there was no comfort in the knowledge that the man he would have married if not for an _alien abduction_ had been so mercilessly tormented during their years apart, or in the certainty that if he had stayed―

_No. Not tonight, Takashi. Not that._

He wondered for a moment if it were Adam or the Atlas who had spoken just then, or if it mattered at all―but then he realized that someone was knocking at the door, and that the person knocking was probably Hunk, or Iverson. 

“Shiro? Shiro, it’s nearly ten. Are you still in there?”

“Hunk?” he called, scrubbing his one sleeve over his eyes and praying that there was no one else waiting outside. “Yeah, I am.”

A pause. “Did you have dinner yet? The dining commons closed half an hour ago, but Lance and I left some soup and garlic bread in your room in case you didn’t. And Keith’s sleeping in our room again, so if you want him to stay in yours instead I can tell him to take his stuff back.”

“No, it’s fine. Tell him to stay with Lance,” whispered Shiro. “You don’t need to wait for me, Hunk. I’ll be out of here in the next ten minutes.”

But when the yellow paladin’s heavy footsteps died away down the corridor he only slumped back onto the vault and closed his eyes, wishing with all his might that he could turn back time, that he could see the bright-eyed boyhood friend he had loved and lost just once again or else undo the utter destruction that had driven Adam to surrender himself to the Atlas two years previously. 

“He had no time to suffer,” Shiro repeated dully, choking on a sob before driving his right fist into the viewing panel with such force that it bounced back and struck the ceiling. “As if I wouldn’t know what that meant.”

He did not move again until Colleen came by an hour later to drag him to bed, and when he fell asleep in the dark he thought he could feel the softest ghost of a kiss on his cheek―as if the kindly soul he adored so deeply had forsaken its body for him, utterly blind to its own grief and desperate to lend him peace enough to let him rest for just a little while.

Adam had always been like that, he thought. 

 _I’m yours, to have and to hold, to take or discard. Takashi, I’ve always been yours_ ―

Always.


	25. Chapter 25

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Shiro and Adam talk, again.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> please leave comments on this chapter guys it took 10000 hours to write and isn't making me remotely happy but ヽ(ー_ー )ノ it's here and not 3 months late so that's what counts *dabs*

“Shiro! Shiro, get _up!_ ” The voice was accompanied by a pair of hands shaking his arm for dear life―first the prosthetic, and then the flesh-and-blood one as whoever was trying to wake him up realized he couldn’t feel anything. “ _Wake up,_ I mean it! Allura’s got the Altean pilot to respond, we need to get down there _stat―_ ”

“What?” Shiro cried, coming alive in a mass of flailing limbs as Keith finally succeeded in dragging him off the bed. “Is she hostile, like we thought?”

“She’s not really doing much right now, so I doubt it,” shrugged his brother. “She’s just sitting with Allura and drinking cocoa, last I heard. Oh, and Adam’s up too, by the way. Asked for Iverson to stop playing motivational ballads over his vault at around five o’clock this morning.”

“Sounds like him,” he breathed, taking a second to calm himself as Keith raced over to the narrow cupboard and threw his uniform coat at his head. “Is he still up now, or―”

“He’s napping. Not one of those weird gaps where he flatlines and doesn’t come on for days, though, he’s actually sleeping. The encephalogram’s going steady like it would for someone asleep, so he should be talking again as soon as he’s rested a bit.” 

Keith paused and helped tuck the end of Shiro’s new coat under his shoulder socket, cramming the hem of his sleeve into the little clip until the fabric looked mostly smooth enough to pass a standard inspection. 

“Whatever he did with Luka really messed him up, but he’s okay now,” he sighed, frowning at the worried pucker in Shiro’s forehead. “You can relax now, jeez.”

“Luka?” said Shiro, steadily ignoring whatever Keith had said about relaxation. “Who―”

“That’s the Altean girl’s name. Hurry up, Shiro, come _on._ ”

Shiro did hurry, dragging on his boots and trousers and jogging down to medical with Keith trailing along behind him. He’d expected to find the pilot’s room full, but as far as he could tell it was almost completely empty; Luka was still sitting on the bed where the doctors placed her two days earlier, nursing a mug of hot chocolate and leaning on Romelle’s arm. Allura was perched on the edge of one of the armchairs, looking uncomfortably between the two younger women and glancing at the door every now and then as if waiting for help to arrive. 

“Shiro!” she cried, shoulders drooping in relief as he and Keith let themselves in. “Thank the Ancients you’re here, maybe you two can―”

“I’m not going to tell them anything I haven’t told you,” the girl on the bed insisted, looking remarkably alert for a patient who had been in a coma for at least a couple of years. “I’m not hiding anything, I know I’m safe here. What reason could I have to lie?”

“Adam turned over your ship’s energy readings.” said Keith, lifting his eyebrows at the interruption. “If they mean what they think they mean, you have every reason to lie. That’s why I got Shiro down, to make sure you told the truth.”

“I’m missing something here,” Shiro cut in, puzzled. “Why would you need me to make sure she tells the truth?”

“Balmeran crystals can respond somewhat to their owner’s wishes, especially if they’ve been integrated into their owners’ bodies,” Allura explained. “They’ve been used in lie-detecting devices for centuries, and the software in your arm has enough versatility to just...make one we can use, if that’s what you tell it to do.”

“So you’re saying that if I want my arm to glow if she lies, it’ll work?” Shiro lifted his prosthesis and blinked at it, wondering what else the new weaponized limb was capable of. “Seriously?”

“Open the power compartment,” urged Romelle, pointing to the tiny cell that held the jewel from Allura’s crown. “Luka can tap into it with her own quintessence then, and it’ll respond however you tell it to, Shiro.”

“You don’t seem very concerned about the fact that she could be lying.”

“I’m more afraid she’s telling the truth,” Romelle said brightly. “For reasons I absolutely _cannot_ think about right now.”

_What?_ Shiro mouthed, shooting a glance at Keith. _What does she me―_

Keith shook his head and grimaced. _You’ll see. I didn’t want Lance and the rest to hear anything until we’d confirmed it either way, but it’s important._ Now that Shiro looked closely he realized that his brother seemed almost on the verge of fainting, standing close to the wall for support and pausing every now and then to wipe sweat off his snow-white forehead. 

“Um...all right, I guess,” he muttered, pressing the catch over Allura’s gem and holding it out to Luka. “Do you need to touch it or something?”

“No, I can reach it from here.” 

His arm went completely numb, and two seconds later the blue-white glow of the jewel melted into a soft peach color, a shade or two lighter than Luka’s hair and the marks under her eyes. The blood drained out of Allura’s face at the sight of it, and after a moment or two she gathered herself and fixed Luka with a piercing look. 

“Tell us again,” she ordered. “And leave nothing out, this time.”

*    *    *

_So you mean that killing Lotor did nothing but leave the Altean colony vulnerable to Honerva?_

“That’s what it looks like,” Shiro sighed, resting his cheek over Adam’s glass viewing panel. “Everyone’s in shock. Allura finally came out with the readings from those planets Luka’s ship drained while we were in the rift, and―Adam, they destroyed whole _solar systems,_ billions and billions of people just _gone,_ and it’s all our f―”

_No, it wasn’t,_ snapped Adam. _You were dead, weren’t you? That’s what Keith said, that you were trapped inside your lion for a year and had absolutely no clue what was going on that whole time. You didn’t have a damn thing to do with this, Takashi, and I’m not going to let you sit here and take on the blame yourself._

“But it isn’t the others’ fault, either!” he cried. “Lotor murdered close to two thousand people from Romelle’s colony, as far as she could tell, and that’s only as long as she’s been alive! Do you know how old he was, _janu?_ Alteans usually live for close to a thousand years by our reckoning, and Lotor already exceeded ten times his natural lifespan with no sign of aging at all, by the time he died.”

_It doesn’t really matter whose fault it is right now,_ Adam countered. _Luka and I talked while I was under, and she told me there were at least seven more of those vessels out there when hers was launched two years ago. We can think about blame once all of them have been dealt with, and not a moment before._

“Seven?” croaked Shiro, feeling suddenly faint. “What was she trying to do with all that quintessence?”

_From what Luka said, Honerva was going to gather it all and bring her son back from the rift. But being in there so long would have killed him, wouldn’t it?_

“I’d be surprised if it didn’t. That’s how she and Zarkon died the first time, and they were in there for only about an hour.”

Adam fell silent and angled the camera above the door closer to Shiro’s face while dimming and brightening the lights over the vault just like the Atlas liked to do when it was thinking. The lull stretched on for nearly ten minutes, and at last Shiro began to wonder if Adam had fallen asleep again. “Sweetheart?”

_I’m thinking,_ Adam told him, activating the greenish lightbulb that made him look as if he were sleeping underwater. _The colony Lotor set up―how old was it exactly?_

“Thousands of years old, I would guess? I’ll ask Romelle later, but it was probably close to nine thousand. Lotor wouldn’t have had the freedom to orchestrate a rescue operation that large until his father banished him, and he was well into adulthood by then.”

_And in all that time Honerva never laid eyes on the place even once?_

“I don’t think she did,” said Shiro uncertainly. “She was completely loyal to Zarkon until Lotor came back, so she would probably have turned them over to him if she ever found out.”

_And despite all that, she arrived there within three months after her son went missing. What are the odds of the colony being found and exploited so very quickly, even by her? Didn’t Keith say the colony was guarded by some kind of warp in space-time? It took him and his mother two years to get from one side of it to the other, and Honerva―_

“She got there in only three months,” Shiro muttered. “I guess she could have wormholed, but...”

_She couldn’t have,_ Adam pointed out. _If she had the means to access a wormhole she would’ve gotten there right after she lost her track on Lotor through your clone. But if she took three months, she would have had to have journeyed there the long way around, and if she cut the travel time so short―_

“She didn’t go through the time dilation,” he whispered. “Even Keith was gone for almost six months on our end. You’re saying she must have known where the colony was, and that there was another way in.”

_It seems like the only reasonable explanation. And if she did know how to get there, she must have found out about the colony while Lotor was still alive._

Adam paused. 

_Luka said it was so well-protected that no one could have realized what was hidden there until they were within the settlement itself. And no one ever visited but for Lotor and his four Galra generals, so no one but Lotor could have betrayed them._

“Within Luka’s lifetime, maybe,” Shiro reminded him. “Honerva might have gone years before Luka was even born. It might even have been Lotor who showed her how to get there, since I doubt he was losing two years out of his life every time he visited.”

_Why did he show her, though? That’s the part that’s not making sense to me._

“Adam, he was draining people for quintessence just like his father, why _wouldn’t_ he have betrayed them?”

_No, not that. Didn’t he hate his mother almost more than he hated Zarkon?_

“How did you know that?” wondered Shiro. Lotor had indeed seemed detest Honerva―or Haggar, as she was then―far more than he either feared or disliked his father, even when one considered the fact that Lotor and Zarkon had actively wanted to kill each other. It made sense now that he thought about it, he realized; Zarkon’s empire had been built on Honerva’s twisted alchemy, and once she was out of the picture her husband was killed in plain old-fashioned hand-to-hand combat. “He did, yeah. Back on the Castle, he regarded Zarkon as an enemy to be defeated, but Haggar...Lotor held her in contempt, somehow, although he never said why. Allura told me once that he refused to believe she was his mother.”

_He must have known, though. Even if his father tried to hide the knowledge from him, the presence of a sole Altean by Zarkon’s side would have been a dead giveaway._

“I can’t really make sense of any of it right now,” Shiro admitted, running his hands through his hair and frowning at the two white strands that fluttered onto his nose. “There’s something we’re not getting, and I can’t figure out what.”

_It might not even matter, Takashi. Don’t worry about it too much._

They were quiet for a little while after that; it had been nearly a week since they last had the chance to talk to one another, and after the confusion of finding the Altean robeast and then the pilot inside it, Adam’s presence was a better balm than sleep, or food, or even one of the mind-healing pods Coran once urged Shiro to try before they left Arus. 

“You sound better,” Shiro ventured at last, kissing the panel just over Adam’s forehead. “You couldn’t stay conscious for more than forty-five minutes before we launched, remember? Are you feeling okay now?”

_Fit as a fiddle, sweetheart. I’m not even sleepy._

“There was one thing I wanted to ask, if you don’t mind telling me,” he said haltingly, wondering just how badly he was going to regret opening his mouth within the next five seconds. “Those scars on your back, _koishii_ ―how did you get them? The Atlas ran a scan to show me that nothing was wrong, and those bands came up on the dermal layer―"

_You’ve been a soldier, even though you never wanted to,_ Adam whispered. _You have scars too, don’t you?_

“Well, yeah, but you were never...” His lips seemed to freeze solid as he realized what exactly Adam had said, and then―

_“What?”_

_I was deployed to Ahmedabad  for just over thirteen months, under my mother’s MI division. I thought you knew._

“The Atlas told me you were _sick,_ not that you―” Shiro swallowed. “Not that you _fought._ I thought you would’ve been in the peace corps, or in an administrative position while you recovered―where did they send you, that someone could have―"

_Walking down the street not three blocks away from the Ahmedabad city hall,_ confessed Adam. _I was on furlough then, so I didn’t have my uniform on or anything. But it was going to hell there, Takashi. Someone...someone recognized me on sight, dragged me up into the nearest mandir with a gang of thugs and―well, you get the picture. My cousin Azadeh got me out of there and killed one of them while she was at it, but I don’t remember much more than that. It all happened too quickly, and I was unconscious by the time she found me, besides._

“Recognized you?” he repeated, sick to his stomach and shaking like a leaf where he sat in the split-bottomed chair. “What do you mean, they rec―”

One of the auxiliary bulbs flashed on and illuminated Adam’s face, moving from his long-lashed eyes to his cheekbones and then to the brown hair puddled limply beneath his head. _My looks aren’t very common around there, janaana. I think my being so clearly mixed made it even worse. They had it out for me anyway, since I stopped them from doing the same thing to a university student just two days before that, but if I looked a little more like my father I doubt it would have happened._

“Why did you go?” Shiro pleaded, dropping his head into his hands. “You didn’t have to, you could have stayed here at the Garrison for as long as you wanted. And your father sent you to school in America just so you would stay out of danger, so why, _why_ would you ever―”

_I was alone, Takashi. What else could I have done?_

_*_ _*_ _*_

Adam’s enlistment had caused something of a schism in the little grey Shindola cottage after he broke the news. 

His grandfather did not come to the station to see him off, but even that was something of a mercy–after throwing Adam bodily from the house he simply locked the door and shut them all out in the yard, sweeping the red silk curtains across the front window and withdrawing into the gloom so quickly that he looked like a trail of smoke rippling over water.

“Well,” huffed Shanti, glaring at the doorknob as if it were personally responsible for the events of the last six hours. “That was rude.”

“I pushed him too far, that’s all,” Adam sighed. “And my train leaves at nine, anyway. Let go of me, baba–my bags are still upstairs, remember?”

“Not anymore,” his aunt observed, pointing to the khidki on the second level. Someone had flung the lower pane open to the icy drizzle, and as the three of them stood gaping in the garden below Adam’s two carpet-bags flew straight over the porch roof and landed in the grass at their feet. 

“Really?” he muttered, gathering them up into his arms. “Throwing me out is one thing, but these were Amma’s.”

Uma and Shanti said nothing to that, and not for the first time Adam wondered if his grandfather had truly regarded his only daughter-in-law so highly as he always insisted. It would explain why his sisters were never subject to Ashok’s tempers when they were children, he thought–the twins looked nothing like their mother at all, and though Rumi had her eyes and slight figure the resemblance between Yasmeen Umarzai and her only son was so strong that her old commanding officers had frozen in their seats when they first met him at her funeral, thirteen years old and hiding behind his uncle like some kind of frightened wild thing in a snare. He had her face exactly, if one discounted the sunblack skin Ashim had given him–less heavy in the jaw than his father’s, delicate and fine about the nose and cheekbones, and finished by the striking disjoint of a great overhanging forehead that smudged his brown eyes in shadow and full red lips that would not have looked out of place on the yellow-painted Devi that Uma brought to the house each year for Navratri. 

_What did Khondakar say before Papa sent me to the States?_ he wondered, climbing behind the steering wheel of the old white market lorry and setting his bags on the rain-damp seat beside him. _That I looked so much like Amma that even someone they used to know before they were married would be sure I was hers? It would make sense if that’s why I get on his nerves so much, I guess._

The old man had not wanted another grandson either, Adam realized, at least not through Ashim. Adam’s elder cousin Varun was the apple of his grandfather’s eye, and even when he signed over his share of the farm to his mother and ran away to the city in secret to marry a foreign exchange student Ashok had not said a word against him–not even when Varun finally sent word that he would not be coming back, since his wife had managed to get him a visa to bring him back overseas with her. 

Suddenly he remembered a conversation he overheard when he was very small, an argument between his father and grandfather after he himself had come home from school with bruises all up his legs after standing between a classmate and a tyrant of a boy in the form above theirs who often beat the younger students with a cane whenever the fancy struck him. Ashim bandaged the cuts and then put him to bed with a mug of hot milk and a stuffed blue tiger, but in the midst of his dreams the five-year-old Adam woke to Ashok shouting in the living room and his father on the verge of tears, begging him to be silent and leave him alone–

What was it his grandfather had said after that?

_I will not have another weakling like you in this house, Ashim! Send the boy away if you must, or bring Meenu home and ask her to raise her own children for once in her life, but I will not bear this again!_

That had made no sense at all, he thought wearily–not his father’s pain, nor even his grandfather’s anger, and certainly not the role his mother had played in it all.

*    *    *

“He’ll change his mind,” Uma said at the station two hours later, holding her nephew by the shoulders and squeezing his arms until he nodded. “And even if he won’t, it doesn’t matter. Your share of the property already belongs to you, and if Papa can’t get over himself I’ll move back in with Rudra and hire someone from the tenant village to cook for him.”

“I don’t think anyone but Ma will be able to handle him, to be honest,” remarked his cousin, tugging at the sleeve of Adam’s tunic with fingers so pale and stiff from the cold that he pulled his own thick gloves onto her hands . “I’d be surprised if he went even a day without complaining about no one fetching his coffee at five o'clock in the morning like she does.”

“You don’t have to do that,” he murmured. “Be gentle with him, he’s getting old. And grieving, for good reason.”

“He’s also feeling guilty. For good reason.”

“Shanti, he–”

“There’s no excuse for a man banishing a grandson from his house,” his aunt cut in. “None of this was your fault, and the sooner you learn to accept it the happier we’ll all be.”

Adam would have argued further if either of them were remotely inclined to listen to him, but the old steam train was whistling for all it was worth, and the two young girls at the ticket stand had already sounded the five-minute warning bell–so he gathered up his bags and let out a bark of laughter as Shanti seized him and began stuffing sweets into his pockets, kissing her once on the tip of her nose before hugging his aunt and making his way down the platform to the the emptiest passenger car (which was, predictably, not empty at all). There were no open seats, as Adam had expected; but the carriage was crowded enough to keep him upright if someone pulled the emergency brake, which was all one could really hope for on any of the nineteen interstate lines.

He spent the next five hours leaning against the window, striking a slightly ridiculous figure in his tasselled shawl and dust-brown army uniform, still so new that the folds of the collar bit into his throat when he bent his head. The starchy fabric did little to keep out the cold, and for a moment he thought of the uniforms he had worn back in the states, orange and cream and then a deep dark olive–and wished that Rumi and the twins could have come to see him off, or at least found time to call before they left home. But their division was a punishing one at best, and after all it was more likely than not that he would end up near them anyway. 

“What did it feel like when you left, sweetheart?” he whispered, bringing Takashi’s ring to his lips and kissing the round center diamond as he had done at least thrice a day ever since the Theia-Selene crashed on Kerberos. “Did it feel like this?”

_No, sunshine,_ came the frantic answer somewhere in the back of his mind. _Baby, you don’t have to go–they’re dying in droves out there, janu, don’t do this to me, don’t, you haven’t even been trained for a month–I need you, Keith needs you, and I swear I’m coming back, I swear it–wait for me, I’m begging you–_

“You can’t, honey,” murmured Adam, lifting his gaze to meet the ashen reflection in the half-open window beside him. “I know you’d cross heaven and earth to come back to me, if you could. But it doesn’t matter now, moonlight, I–I can, so I’m coming to _you._ ”

  
  
  



End file.
